


Intersections: Against the Odds

by Caedus501



Series: Intersections [3]
Category: Catalyst: A Rogue One Novel - James Luceno, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Glacially Slow Burn, Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-26
Updated: 2017-03-26
Packaged: 2018-10-10 22:05:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 26,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10448568
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Caedus501/pseuds/Caedus501
Summary: After months of searching and looking in obscure corners of the galaxy, Cassian couldn’t believe what he was hearing.  In fact, he didn’t.  He’d been down this road before and knew better than to get his hopes up that someone had actually, finally found Jyn Erso.  Between Erso and the nebulous rumors of a weapon, Cassian had been chasing leads from Coruscant to Kessel, all of them turning to dust in the wind.  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to check it out though.  Jyn Erso was potentially connected to something too big for him to brush aside the observations of one of his fellow soldiers.***Jyn Erso is trying to stay one step ahead of everyone trying to find her by moving from planet to planet.  Cassian Andor trying to track down not only Jyn and Galen Erso, but a weapon with terrifying potential.  Based on a tip, the two meet just once more before the events of Rogue One shape both their destinies and the future of the Rebellion.





	

**Author's Note:**

> This is the final installment of the Intersections series. I hope you like how I answered some of my lingering questions from the movie and novelization of Rogue One. Thanks to everyone to commented or kudo'd parts one and two, it was great to get feedback!

_Intersections_

_Part 3:_   _Against the Odds_

 

**Approximately 1 month BBY**

 

Suffice it to say, Jyn was not amused.  She glared at the blue tinged holo of Talon Karrde and decided he had never really liked her at all.

“I know I owe you a favor, Karrde, and a big one at that, but this sounds like a really bad idea.  It’s just not your style.  Why hit the outpost at all?”

“Oh, I agree with you there, but this isn’t a personal crusade.  Well not for me.  Car’das is, shall we say, less than pleased with the number of his men the Empire has taken off the map in the last year which has severely affected his profit margin.  The man has a vengeful streak,” Karrde explained.

That made Jyn even less inclined to find passage to the Corellian system to join ranks with a group of smugglers and criminals that she didn’t know and definitely didn’t trust to take out an Imperial outpost.  Fighting the Empire because it was morally the right thing to do was one thing, but attacking a base, even a small one, because a crime boss found the Empire _annoying_ was a whole different matter.  She’d taken part in similar actions before, back when she was a member of Saw Gererra’s cadre of Partisan fighters, but at least she had known the people she was going into battle with, as well as their skills and weaknesses.  Attacking and infiltrating a secure complex with a handful of unknowns was like flying blind through an asteroid field.

“Are you sure there isn’t something else I can do to repay my debt?  I don’t think I’m really qualified for this type of operation,” she said, trying to negotiate her way out of making a trip into the Core.

“Tanith, you are perhaps the most qualified of the seven of you I’ve chosen for this venture.”

“It’s Liana.  I’d appreciate it if you could remember my name on occasion, Karrde.”  She had only been Liana Hallik from Commenor for a few months, but it was important that she only maintain one identity at a time.

“Right, of course.  Liana,” he said in a placating tone of voice.  “It’s just so hard to keep track after that business with the bounty hunter.”

“That business with the bounty hunter” was the whole reason she was in this mess.  She had called Karrde for help in getting a bounty hunter off her back after an incident on Tatooine.  In what would be her waning days as Tanith Pontha she had taken a contract from Jabba the Hutt, but the deal went south in a big way.  Honestly, she should have known better than to deal with a Hutt, but she was either desperate or unwilling to admit that she had developed an ego about her skill as a smuggler, she still hadn’t figured out which it was.

Jabba didn’t seem to like that Jyn was unwilling to accept payment in the form of several pounds of glitterstim which she would then have to find a buyer for before she saw any return on the cache of weapons she was delivering to the Hutt on Tatooine.  Then he had refused to let her load the merchandise back on her ship and leave.  Apparently anything in his palace was his property, whether he had paid for it or not.  Jyn had asked for the night to consider the offer which she had absolutely no intention of taking (she did not trade in drugs), and instead attempted to smuggle her haul back out of the palace to her ship.  Needless to say, she got caught and ended up in a shoot-out with a couple of Jabba’s henchmen.  Eventually she decided her life was more important than a couple thousand credits and managed to rig a couple of power-packs to blow and cover her retreat.  She was able to make it off Tatooine and into hyperspace without being followed, but she’d had to sell her ship and change her name almost immediately to help avoid the bounty she knew had been placed on Tanith Pontha’s head as soon as the smoke had cleared.  She now made a strict habit of staying well away from that particular sector of the Outer Rim.

Of course, that didn’t mean that the bounty hunters couldn’t find you anywhere in the galaxy.  Despite going by the name Kallea and taking some temporary work as a bartender, a young hunter calling himself Mercurial Swift had caught up with her out in the Corporate Sector.  Jyn had fought her way out of his clutches once then sent a message to Karrde asking for help.  She was low on credits at the time so he had agreed to accept a favor of his choosing as payment for helping the young bounty hunter to see that hunting her down was really not in his best interests.  She had no idea how he’d done it or what he’d said, but she owed Karrde her life.  No doubt he had casually mentioned it in conversation to remind her of that fact.

“Fine.  I guess I’m going to Talus.  Do you have any other information I might need to know for this little trip?”

Karrde filled her in on most of the other members of the team he was putting together, where she would be meeting them and the overall goals of the operation.  Every sentence out of his mouth made her more and more certain that she was going to regret the entire trip to Talus.  The problem was, her own opinion ultimately didn’t matter.  There were just some people in the universe that you didn’t cross.  Jyn didn’t feel loyalty for anyone these days, not even for Karrde, and if her survival depended on betraying someone she was supposed to be working with then she would take her opening.  Talon Karrde, however, had vast resources at his disposal, and while he claimed to not hold grudges, she couldn’t imagine him being forgiving if she just decided not to show when he had called in her debt.  She sighed in resignation and began to sort through the local port information for a ship that was heading toward the Core.

Jyn would probably be the last to admit it but she was starting to feel tired of her itinerant lifestyle.  She didn’t have her own ship at the moment which had been a factor that had provided a modicum of comfort and familiarity while she was still smuggling contraband throughout the galaxy.  She had been on the move since the bounty hunter incident, changing cities and planets every couple of weeks.  In an effort to further obscure her identity, Jyn had even cut her hair off at her shoulders and dyed it back to its natural dark brown color.  The stylish silhouette of Tanith Pontha had been abandoned for her current rough and ready gear, which was more or less what she had on hand when she had sold the _Crystal Fire_ : a shirt, cargo trousers, and a padded vest to help keep her warm.  Her current look wasn’t as monochromatic as it had been when she was smuggling, nor was it bright and colorful like Kestrel Dawn’s preferred palate, but it was undoubtedly completely utilitarian.  When Jyn looked in the mirror she saw someone who resembled her mother a great deal, but had none of her mother’s faith in the goodness of life.  She tried not to look at her reflection too closely.

It hadn’t escaped her notice that in running away from a false identity she was beginning to look like herself for the first time in years, even if she didn’t really know who Jyn Erso was anymore.

What Jyn really lacked as Liana Hallik was a purpose.  Not necessarily a cause, she didn’t think a belief in something would help her situation much.  But at least as Kestrel she knew she was a slicer, and as Tanith she was a proud smuggler.  As Liana she was just another person wandering from rock to rock struggling to survive and occasionally getting drawn into a tussle with law enforcement.  It was a surprisingly exhausting lifestyle.  It didn’t help that the last decent night of sleep she’d had was when she was still Tanith Pontha.  Back when she had a ship that she could call her own, a couple thousand credits to her name, and the ability to close her eyes for more than two to three hours at a stretch without waking up to check her surroundings.  She hated it and she needed something to _do._   That was probably a solid quarter of the reason she would board a hulking passenger cruiser the next day at dawn to take part in something she suspected might kill her or land her in custody.  It was a stupid idea, but at least taking on a small Imperial outpost would give structure to her life for a few days.

 

***

 

The ride to the Corellian system was uneventful, but it left Jyn with an even worse opinion of several sentient species than when she had got onboard.  People were so nosy.  A blue skinned Pantoran who was probably near Jyn’s age seemed to make it her mission in life to not let Jyn have a moment of peace on the trip from Mandalore to Alderaan then on to Corellia.  After about thirty minutes of terse one word answers from a surly and glaring Jyn, the girl finally gave up on trying to extract Jyn’s life story and turned to the Twi’lek sitting on her other side for further conversation.  Jyn did her best to tune them out but her efforts hit a road block when a young human male sat across from them and happily joined the two women in conversation.  Logically Jyn knew she couldn’t just blast them all for being annoying, but it helped to imagine it for a few moments.  Instead she wrapped her scarf around her head hoping the fabric would muffle the sound of their chattering.  She wouldn’t have slept with so many unknown people around her anyway, but she had hoped to find some of the peace she used to know when she had taken the _Crystal Fire_ through hyperspace.

The public transport ship had only gotten Jyn as far as Corellia, the principal planet in the system.  With her ever dwindling funds she still had to get herself to Talus, one of the lesser known neighboring worlds in the system and notable for being one of the Twin Worlds along with its partner Tralus.  It was a terrestrial planet with a temperate climate and its fair share of urban areas.  Most of the economy was based around building starships, but there was a contingent of both miners and farmers on the planet, as well as a couple large business enterprises.  On the whole it wasn’t the type of place Jyn thought the Empire would even bother with considering it already had a strong presence on Corellia itself.  Karrde had warned her that the Empire was keeping an eye on the populace to discourage any formal Rebel activity, but the sector’s Moff left most of the actual governing and security of Talus to the Federation of the Double Worlds.  Jyn distantly knew that a good portion of the Rebellion’s ranks were filled with Corellians, but she didn’t think there was a Rebel base anywhere in the system.  A base this close to the Core on a world this populated would never be kept secret for long.  Still, the fact that the Imperials in the outpost were looking out for any insurgent activity would make it more difficult to take them by surprise.

Jyn hurried out of the spaceport with the one small bag of possessions she could still call her own and set out into the city to get her bearings.  Nashal wasn’t the capitol of Talus, but the city was still sprawling and rather cosmopolitan.  It was built up on either side of the Mephyt River with the wealthy elite dwelling on one riverbank and the major business and commercial districts on the other.  The cityscape around the Nashal Starport where she had landed didn’t contain the most artistic architecture, but neither did it contain the blocky, unadorned industrial type buildings of some of the other major cities she had been to over the years.  As one moved away from the river and the city center, both the businesses and residences got less glamorous and more suited to the average citizen.  Karrde had given her an address that was a decent distance from the riverfront downtown areas where the whole team was supposed to congregate to plan the finer details of their operation.  It turned out to be a small building in a residential area, and Jyn took a moment to marvel at the fact that Karrde had apparently rented them a house to stay in and not just a couple of rooms in a half abandoned building.  She supposed he could afford it, but was surprised that he had bothered.

She didn’t walk right into the building, just in case this was all some elaborate plot to capture or kill her, and she wanted to see if anyone else would enter the flat first.  She watched a Zabrak, who could have been a local from the Zabrak colony somewhere on the planet, cautiously pass through the door and then twenty minutes later a man in khaki and blue with a flaming red patch of something on his jacket entered as well.  Jyn didn’t hear any evidence of a struggle going on inside, there was no blasterfire or screaming.  Another twenty minutes of watching provided no further information about what she would find on the other side of the door, but Jyn had grown impatient with waiting.  She would just have to go for it and have her blaster and truncheons at the ready.

Jyn approached the door warily and knocked twice, her finger poised over her blaster trigger.  No one answered.  She tried the control that opened the door and it immediately responded to her touch with the hiss of pneumatics.  Blaster held in front of her, Jyn entered a small hallway that had a set of stairs off to one side that clearly led to the upper levels of the building.  Unsurprisingly there was a man with red hair and a blue and brown jumpsuit on the stairway with his own blaster pointed in her direction. The Zabrak along with a tall pale woman with inky black hair and tattoos covering one side of her face were positioned on either side of the door with weapons of their own trained on her.

“Who are you and what are you doing here?” the man on the stair asked.

“Liana Hallik.  I was hired by Talon Karrde for a job,” she told them without a hint of fear in her voice.  “A job he failed to mention Dash Rendar would be helping with.”

“See now, this is getting to be a problem,” Rendar said from the stairway, his blaster not wavering a centimeter.  “I feel like a good smuggler shouldn’t be so easily recognized, otherwise people assume he’s up to no good everywhere he goes.”

“If you’re worried about being recognized I hope you didn’t bring that famous ship of yours to Talus,” she said pointedly.

“Give me some credit.  The _Outrider_ is in safe hands while I’m here.  I definitely don’t want the Empire to recognize me.  Which brings us back to the original problem.”

Jyn studied the well-known Corellian smuggler with pale skin and bright green eyes under his red hair.  Despite his nonchalant air, she could tell he was tightly coiled with tension in the face of her sudden appearance.  The man had a reputation for fast flying, a quick trigger finger, and finishing, to the letter, the job he was paid for.  She was honestly surprised he would take a gig like this.  Karrde must have been paying _him_ well, at least.

“I think it depends on who’s doing the recognizing,” she said after a few moments.  “If you don’t have a name who’s going to hire you?”

“Is that your expert opinion?  What would you know about contending with a reputation?”

Jyn was slightly offended.  She might not have reached the same level of notoriety as Dash Rendar, but she had made a decent name for herself as Tanith Pontha. Granted, she wasn’t going by Pontha at the moment so how would he know?  “I’ve done my fair share of smuggling, thank you.  I wouldn’t be here if I hadn’t.”

Rendar’s eyes narrowed on her.  Jyn’s blaster remained aimed at his chest.  “Liana Hallik?  Never heard of you.”

“But Talon Karrde has.”

She could tell her point had landed by the way Rendar’s mouth pursed like he was trying not to show that she had cornered him.  In her peripheral vision Jyn could tell the two holding blasters to either side of her had grown bored with the conversation, but they were still unwilling to lower their weapons.

“Oh good,” said a new voice from down the hallway, interrupting the short staring contest between Jyn and Rendar.  A fourth person entered the room, but his blaster was holstered at his side.  “You’re the last to arrive.  Now we can all stow our weapons and get on with things.”  He turned right around and headed back down the hallway he had come from, trusting that the four of them wouldn’t shoot each other when his back was turned.

Jyn raised her eyebrows at the Corellian smuggler then glanced at the two on either side of her.  As the one out numbered she was clearly not going to lower her blaster first.  Rendar must have read her intent in the set of her eyebrows and the stubborn twist of her mouth because he nodded minutely to his cohorts and all three lowered their weapons simultaneously. Jyn followed suit a couple of seconds later then led the way down the hall to find the others.

There were seven of them in total, ranging from large and muscle-bound to Jyn’s own petite stature.  Most were human, but there was the male Zabrak she had noted earlier and a green skinned Mirialan female among their ranks.  Then there was the other female whose clothing resembled some odd combination of a Hapan noblewoman’s and a scantily clad Twi’lek’s and had skin too pale to be human, but Jyn wasn’t entirely sure.  The sharp looking tattoo curling around her forehead made her even more exotic looking.   Jyn moved her gaze over all of them, decided she would be sleeping with her blaster under her pillow, and moved to sit in a comfortable looking chair in the corner.  She could tell from the holo of the Imperial outpost hovering above a small projector on a low table in the middle of the room that the group had already begun the planning process in her absence.  She didn’t mind.  If they could do the job without her, she would gladly be on her way.

No one bothered with introductions.  Either they all knew each other already, which Jyn found unlikely, or no one thought names were important at this juncture.  The oldest of the group, the one who had told Jyn she had been the last to arrive, merely handed her a glass of amber liquid before turning back to the holoimage.  Evidently she wasn’t going to get any time to settle in.

“Right, so brief recap: we are tasked with infiltrating the Imperial outpost here on Talus and taking out the armory and all the ships on the landing pad.” He pointed to the two locations on the holomap and clicked a few buttons so that those two areas were magnified off to the side.  “When those two tasks are complete we are also supposed to transmit a message from Car’das himself from within the base to Moff Vorru, who is in charge of this sector, detailing the extent of the damage we inflict.”

Jyn rolled her eyes at that.  Was the gloating necessary?  Karrde had said that Car’das wanted to send a message, but she didn’t think he meant it literally.

“How we take the base is up to us,” the man continued, “And personally, I don’t see the benefit in blowing up all those lovely weapons if we can find a way to smuggle them out the gate.  I know for a fact that Imperial grade blaster rifles and thermal charges go for a pretty sum on the black market.”

Jyn couldn’t disagree with that, she’d moved a fair amount of them in the past.  The problem came from the added complications that the theft would bring to an already dangerous operation.

“How’s that going to work, exactly?” she asked the room at large.  “We’ll need a skiff or at least a speeder to carry the damn things out and someone is bound to notice us if we have some kind of vehicle puttering around making noise.”

“True,” said the pale woman.  “I think we should figure out a way in before we worry about whether or not taking something out is practical.”

“Alright.  So how are we getting in?  What sort of security does this place have? What are their numbers and assets?” the Mirialan asked in accented Basic.

The older man took over again.  “Aerial recon shows there’s at least one full company of stormtroopers, at least twelve pilots, some ground crew, and a couple handfuls of officers staffing the outpost.  They’ve got a couple of cargo ships, a squadron of TIEs, a few speeder bikes, and a few AT-PTs all arrayed on a landing pad. There are guards posted at each of the three gates, here, here, and here,” he said pointing.  “They have lookouts on the walls, and the gates themselves are ray shielded.”

“So we take out the guards and the lookouts nearest the gate then take down the shields.  Maybe we can find the shield generator and hit that, or the control panel or something.  Quieter would be better,” the man in khaki finished with a frown.

“Hey, Mr. Rebellion, why don’t you stop and think before you go shooting everything in sight and they call an air strike on us. You can’t just take out the guards and expect no one to notice.”  Everyone paused at Jyn’s outburst like she had committed some huge social faux pas.  Everyone but Rendar who was studying his drink like it had personally offended him.  “What?”

“Why do you think I’m with the Rebellion?” the man in khaki asked into the quiet room.

Jyn rolled her eyes.  “Look buddy—“

“Colm.  My name is Arwin Colm.”

“Alright, Colm, if you don’t want people to know you’re with the Alliance perhaps you should think about covering up the blazing red insignia on your chest.  The Alliance starbird is kind of distinctive.”

Colm looked down at his chest in surprise then looked back up at the rest of them. “Huh. What do you know?”

“How did a Rebel soldier end up here with us?” the Zabrak asked.

Colm shrugged.  “I wasn’t always with the Alliance.  I had a good run at smuggling before the Empire shot down my ship and killed my partner.”

The silence took on a contemplative quality as each of them thought about how the Empire had screwed them over personally and the galaxy at large.  “Bastards,” someone said in a whisper.  Jyn knew they could probably lose hours if they started swapping stories of the Empire’s atrocities.  It sounded like a conversation Jyn distinctly wanted no part of, so she had to be the one to bring them back on topic.

“My point still stands.”  Jyn said to the group at large.  “This isn’t some pre-fab Imperial installation.  It’s a kriffing star fort!”

“Alright, then what _is_ your point?” Rendar asked.

“There are no blind spots and no dead zones.  The whole layout is designed so that every part of the perimeter can be seen and defended from another point on the wall.  That leaves us with no entry point.”

“If they’re going to see us coming,” Colm said as he struggled with something stashed against a wall, “Then we’ll give them something to look at.”  He was grinning as he deposited a box on the table so they could see its contents of explosive charges.  Then he reached behind him and picked up a rocket launcher and his grin became manic.  “I’ve been looking for an excuse to use this thing.”

“You’ll never get close enough to set the charges without being seen,” Jyn said, exasperated.

“The charges are for the actual infiltration.  We draw their fire over here,” he said pointing to one inward angle of the outpost, “And a second team quietly takes out the guards and the gate on the opposite side of the compound then moves through the rest of the base. See? Have some faith, little girl.  I’ve fought my way into a few heavily guarded buildings in my time.  I know what I’m doing.”

Jyn scowled but didn’t say anything more.  If Colm and whoever went with him wanted to run headlong into an Imperial base she wouldn’t stop them, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to join them.  This whole operation was beginning to sound like a suicide mission and Jyn didn’t exactly plan to go out in a blaze of blasterfire fighting for Talon Karrde and his ideal smuggling conditions.  She was pretty sure that just hitting the armory and the landing pads wasn’t going to be enough.  Car’das wanted to send a sign that he wouldn’t let the Empire step all over his operations, fine.  Then they needed to completely destroy the base and everyone in it, otherwise they’d just come back swinging.

The Mirialan suddenly pointed at Jyn.  “You, girl, what is your name?” she demanded.

Jyn raised a defiant eyebrow at the woman’s tone.  “Liana.”

“Liana is right,” the woman continued to Jyn’s surprise.  “Even with a loud diversion on one side of the complex, we will still need to quietly take out the guards at the points here and here on the perimeter wall for this to work.  I suggest I go with the second team so that I can set up a position and hit the guards from long range before they have a chance to see a secondary incursion.”

Using a sniper to take out the guards was a step in the right direction, but it still wasn’t good enough.  They needed to get inside without anyone being the wiser, without even the help of a fiery diversion.  What if the troops just let them in?  There had to be a reason that they disabled the shields: letting patrols in or out, bringing in supplies, something.  She looked around her for a computer terminal or a datapad that she could use and swiped one from the arm of a couch nearby.  While the rest of the group argued about the best way to take the fort in what amounted to a full frontal assault by just three people, Jyn looked for another way in. 

She locked onto the outgoing transmission signal from the outpost and found an archive log of encrypted messages.  Those could be useful, but what she really wanted was some kind of schedule that showed patrol rotations or supply deliveries.  She took a datacard out of her bag and inserted it into the reader so that a program she had developed to decrypt Imperial transmissions could start working on the archive of messages.  Jyn kept digging.  She used a few slicing tricks to find a backdoor into the Imperial holonetwork and rooted around for anything that might look useful and improve her chances of surviving this crazy ride.  Jyn was starting to see why Karrde had wanted her and her slicing abilities on this operation, namely to keep the others from doing things the stupid way.  She really hated working with other people.

As she navigated her way through the system, Jyn became aware that someone was watching her intently.  “Something I can help you with?” she asked.

To her surprise it was the Rebel who answered.  “What did you say your last name was again?”

“Hallik.”

“Are you sure?”

Jyn rolled her eyes.  “Yeah, I’m sure.” She continued her search, but the Rebel wasn’t done with her.

“You ever been to Coruscant?” he asked.

“Lived there until I was four.  Haven’t been back since,” she answered absently.  She was close, she knew it.  She had found the general shift schedule and just needed one more minute to narrow it down to what she was specifically looking for.

Her decryption program alerted her to its completion just as she found a patrol schedule. She looked over all the information and decided it was enough to propose a plan.  It wasn’t everything she hoped, but it was a start.

“I’ve got something,” she said loudly and with authority cutting off both the general conversation and Colm from asking another question.

They all looked at her, some with derision others expectant.  The pale woman, whose name Jyn thought was Yrenne, was completely expressionless.  All the attention was uncomfortable.  She generally preferred to fly under the radar and go unnoticed by everyone, but someone had to be the voice of reason in this group.

“I found their patrol schedule. It’s just two troopers that come and go at a time, but it looks like a patrol returns to base via speeder bike every two hours like clockwork.  Furthermore, the ground crew goes off shift around eighteen hundred hours which will make the landing pad easier to hit.  So if we can ambush the right patrol and take their place then we can get people through the gate and take it down from the inside, quietly.  If we time it so that Emari takes out the guards on the wall from long range while two of us take down the guards inside the gate at the same time, then we have a way in that won’t draw any extra attention.”

The older smuggle who had taken the lead had a faint smile on his face as he appraised Jyn with a new appreciation.  “I see what Karrde meant about you.”

Jyn let the praise slide over her as she continued.  “As an added bonus the outpost’s commander is apparently going to be having dinner with the sector Moff on Corellia, so there will be an extra element of confusion when we blow the charges.”

“How do you know that?” Rendar asked, looking skeptical.

Jyn shrugged.  “It was pretty easy.  I found a log of transmissions from the outpost and ran a decrypt program I’ve developed over the years specifically for Imperial signals.  It doesn’t work on priority transmissions with a level one encrypt code, at least not yet, but I’ve figured out levels five through three.  There are parts of the level two decrypt that are still a bit patchy, but that’s probably because they don’t use that one much so I have less to work with.”

The whole group looked like they were trying not to be impressed.

“You think you can get us into the armory?” the older guy asked.

“As long as they’re not using anything biometric, sure, no sweat.”

“I think we can make this work,” Emari the Mirialan said.

Colm looked disappointed.  “Are you saying I won’t get to use the rocket launcher?”

Jyn rolled her eyes and shook her head in disgust.  Some people just didn’t understand good strategy.

“Actually,” the Zabrak started as he studied the layout of the Imperial outpost, “If we’re trying to make a statement, we can coordinate the attack so that the charges on the landing pad and the armory blow as we simultaneously hit them from the outside. That should maximize their confusion and give the team on the inside more time to escape.  Especially if you’re still set on getting some weapons out.”

Jyn couldn’t really argue with that.  She had a feeling that she would be on the infiltration team and anything that would help cover her escape was okay by her.

“This is good,” the older smuggler said. “Hallik, you’ll be able to transmit Car’das’ message from inside the compound?”

“Of course.”

“Alright, ladies and gentlemen, we have a general plan.  Just a few details to work out, then I say we find some food.”

 

***

 

Cassian made a note on the datapad in his hand before returning his attention to the Senators sitting casually around a low table.  The room he was in was elegantly decorated in light colors that hid the stark tones and angular design aesthetic of the Empire well.  It was a sort of indirect snub of the iron fisted government whose Senate met in the center of this building.

“I’ll see to this matter immediately, Senator.  Please remember that we are scheduled to depart Coruscant in two hours,” he said to Senator Pamlo of Taris who was dressed in a slimming gown of russet for the afternoon’s meetings.

“Very good Joreth.  When you’ve finished with that, see that Captain Moren has the ship prepared for our departure.  I’d love to leave a bit early if it proves at all possible.”

“Yes, Senator.” Cassian gave a slight bow of the head and exited the room into a quiet hallway of the Senate Building.  He let out a tired sigh, but was careful not to let his demeanor change entirely.  There were surveillance cams everywhere and he didn’t want to arouse suspicion from anyone who may be watching the feeds.  Not when he was literally stealing secrets from the heart of the Empire. 

Of all his non-Imperial cover identities Joreth Sward was probably Cassian’s least favorite.  He was a clean cut, stiffly dressed diplomatic aide with a bland Core accent that had to do entirely too much paperwork.  Unfortunately Sward was one of Cassian’s more productive covers so he was obliged to make himself presentable and travel to the Coruscant every once in a while.  He may have been sent to the sprawling planet wide city to check in with his assets among the diplomatic corps of the Imperial Senate, but simply claiming to be a fellow aide didn’t make people believe it.  He had to actually put in the hours of acting as an assistant to Senator Pamlo.  There were endless meetings, social engagements, and private conversations that he was required to hover at the edges of taking notes before he could actually do what he had come to Coruscant to do.  It was a tiresome assignment and there were other things he’d much rather be focused on.

His comlink chirped from the vicinity of his belt.  Since he had just left the Senator, it could only be one person.

“Kay, what is it?”

“Cassian, we just received a transmission from a Sergeant Colm who is currently in the Corellian system on unofficial business.”

Cassian didn’t know what that meant, but Kay couldn’t exactly speak freely given Cassian’s current location. “Can it wait?  I have to meet with one more person before we leave.”

“It could wait, but it is the type of information that has a high probability of changing your plans for our near future,” Kay responded.

“Fine.  What have you got?”

“Sergeant Colm thinks he may have found her.”

“Where?” Cassian asked breathlessly.

“Talus.”

After months of searching and looking in obscure corners of the galaxy, Cassian couldn’t believe what he was hearing.  In fact, he didn’t.  He’d been down this road before and knew better than to get his hopes up that someone had actually, finally found Jyn Erso.  Between Erso and the nebulous rumors of a weapon, Cassian had been chasing leads from Coruscant to Kessel, all of them turning to dust in the wind.  That didn’t mean he wasn’t going to check it out though.  Jyn Erso was potentially connected to something too big for him to brush aside the observations of one of his fellow soldiers.

After he had returned to Base One on Yavin IV and debriefed General Draven and a few members of the Alliance High Command about his time as Lieutenant Willix of the Imperial Navy, he had asked to be put on shorter assignments for a couple of months.  Cassian was good at his job and he understood the importance of his work, but between eight months with the Imperial Security Bureau and another five with the Navy he had begun to lose himself.  Cassian Andor was starting to be more of a memory than a living person.  He knew his limits.  It was for the good of the cause and not just his own good that he had asked for the brief respite.  The day Cassian forgot who he was and what he was ultimately fighting for was the day he slipped up enough to get himself killed, or worse, captured and forced to reveal the Rebellion’s secrets.

He still collected information and rumors under false names from across the galaxy, but he was only pretending to be someone else a week at a time and in the days between he was able to breathe as himself.  He took that time to compartmentalize and forget.  He also took that time to search for Jyn Erso.

Draven had granted Cassian this second request.  Based on scattered information and heavily buried facts, he had asked for permission to pursue the Galen Erso angle.  When he had first heard the name a couple years ago on Toprawa he didn’t have the time to really delve into who the man was and why a drunk had connected Erso with the Empire’s weapons development program.  At the time, Alliance Chief of State Mon Mothma’s response to his report had confirmed that Galen Erso was indeed a high level scientist but had revealed little else.  She told Cassian that she had briefly conversed with the man and his wife back in the waning days of the Republic at a social function a Senate sub-committee for education had thrown to honor past and future graduates of the Brentaal Futures Program.  Mothma couldn’t recall the details of the conversation, just that Erso had seemed distracted, as though his mind was somewhere else entirely.  Apparently his lack of social graces was more than made up for by his wife who had been eager to discuss the benefits of Erso’s current research in energy enrichment using synthetic crystals.  The concept of energy enrichment, a term he had also heard back on Toprawa, had stuck in Cassian’s mind and had darkened with each passing month to turn into energy weaponization.

He couldn’t fully justify to his superiors why he thought Galen Erso was a lead worth following, but they trusted his judgment enough to let him pursue it when he wasn’t on an official assignment.  He had started by scouring the holonet with the help of one of the Alliance data techs whom he had essentially commandeered for the purpose.  They didn’t come up with much.  Just that there was some drama in the man’s past and that when he had gone off the grid several years ago it had most likely been at the Empire’s behest.  There had been a few intercepted communiqués from one “Galen Erso” to various Imperial held worlds, but the Alliance couldn’t crack the encryption on the priority signals.  They hadn’t been able to crack the encryption around the files that outlined what project Celestial Power was either, nor could they figure out why it was such a closely guarded secret.  Cassian’s best guess was that Galen Erso was hidden away somewhere working on some kind of weapon that involved a huge amount of energy.  Possibly even _the weapon._ The weapon that had spawned rumors ranging from terrifying to ridiculous to all too plausible.  In his head, Cassian thought that if he could find one, he would find the other.  Since the hunt for the weapon was growing more frustrating by the day with its lack of concrete answers, Cassian decided that finding Galen Erso was possibly the easier of the two tasks.

Cassian had considered it a breakthrough when the data tech had turned up a birth record from an icy world called Vallt for one Jyn Erso.  The daughter, much like her father, had proved near impossible to find.  All official record of her came to an abrupt end at four years of age when the Ersos had apparently left Coruscant amid a manhunt in the fledgling years of the Empire.  It had crossed Cassian’s mind that the girl could be long dead, or had been taken by the Empire at the same time as her father.  She may even have been existing in the galaxy with absolutely no ties to her father whatsoever, which would make her utterly useless to him, but Cassian thought that to be unlikely.  At least, that’s what he told himself.  Jyn Erso was going to be his way to Galen.  He didn’t want to think about the Empire’s ruthless efficiency and how a free Jyn Erso would be a loose end that they would never let stand.

As there was no holoimage of the girl at what would be her current age, Cassian had the tech compile a holo-rendering based on old images of her parents, Galen and Lyra.  He sent the image along with her name to some of his more discreet and reliable contacts to be on the lookout for her, but so far she was still just a phantom image.

By chance a couple of weeks ago he had been discussing other avenues to try in the hunt for both Ersos with his droid, Kay-Tu, when a passing soldier had interrupted their conversation.

“Did I hear you say you were looking for Erso?”  Cassian had only stared at the soldier whose name he didn’t even know.  “It’s just, I knew a Jyn Erso.  Back when I ran with Saw.”

That got Cassian’s attention.  “Saw?  Saw Gerrera?”

“That’s right.”

“Is she still with him?  They’re somewhere in the Mid Rim right now, yes?” he asked with an intensity that seemed to make the soldier a bit wary of him.

“To be honest, I don’t know.  It’s been years since I left Saw’s cadre, she was maybe thirteen or fourteen.  But the way she was going, it wouldn’t surprise me if she were dead by now.”

“Can you find out?  Is there someone you can contact?”

The soldier seemed to think about it.  “Sure, at least I’ll try.  I can’t promise anything though.  Life expectancy among Saw’s people isn’t high, that’s why I left.”

“Anything you can do to find her would be helpful,” Cassian assured him

It turned out not many of the soldier’s contacts with Saw’s band were still alive and of those who were, none of them had seen Jyn in years and none of them knew where she went when they finally noticed she had left Saw and his men behind.  Cassian was almost back to square one.  The difference was now he knew she had at least survived to the age of sixteen and if she had run with Saw Gerrera for any span of years she was guaranteed to have a certain combat oriented skillset and a tendency to show up where there was trouble.  He continued the search, slowly narrowing his parameters.

He even went so far as to enlist the aid of a good portion of the Rebellion in the search.  Rebel foot soldiers that were sent to reinforce other cells around the galaxy were shown the cobbled together holoimage and told Alliance Command was looking for her, but they were not told why.  This new tip had probably come from just one such a soldier, a sergeant by the name of Arwin Colm, who was apparently on Talus, of all places.  A civilized world known for playing host to any number of diplomatic summits and equally known for its cuisine.  It was probably the last place he’d expect someone like the Jyn Erso he had built up in his mind to be found.  Perhaps he had been wrong about her.

At the very least, Talus was close enough to Coruscant that it wouldn’t be too much trouble to make a side trip before returning to base.  His U-wing, with Kay-Tu onboard, was docked inside the Senator’s ship and at the ready should he need it.  Cassian would just have to alert Senator Pamlo of his new plans, then he and Kay would be able to see if this lead on Jyn Erso actually panned out.  First, however, he had to check on an obscure piece of legislation for the Senator then find one of Moff Wessex’s aides, in reality a Rebel informant, who was on the Imperial capitol planet assisting one of the senators from his sector with a bill proposal.  All the politics and bureaucracy made his head swim.  Cassian honestly couldn’t wait to get off Coruscant.

 

***

 

The first steps of the infiltration plan went off without a hitch.  Around dusk the next day Jyn, Emari, Yrenne, and the older smuggler who turned out to be Jett Nabon a longtime associate of Talon Karrde’s, easily took a pair of stormtroopers by surprise as they stalked through Nashal, the city nearest the outpost.  There wasn’t even a shot fired.  Jyn and one of the others were able to pummel the troopers into unconsciousness before they stole their armor and securely tied them up.  A brief hunt revealed where the two troopers had stashed their speeder bikes and just like that they had a surefire way past the gates.

Jett and Yrenne, were the two to don the white armor as they had the best chance of filling it out properly.  Jyn was much too short to pass as a stormtrooper and Emari was their sniper so she had to be positioned away from the walls anyway. The distinctive horns on the Zabrak’s head meant Azri Kol was unlikely to wear a stormtrooper helmet comfortably while Colm and Rendar were tasked with mounting the exterior offensive.  Once the guards were dealt with and the ray shields around the gate on the far side from the city were disabled Jyn and the others were able to run into the outpost without any problems. 

They split into two teams then, Jyn went with Jett and Emari to deal with the armory since she was probably going to have to do something fancy to get them into the building before she went off to the comm unit at the base of a small satellite dish clear on the other side of the compound.  The tall and pale Yrenne, still in white plastoid, went with Kol to deal with the complement of both air and ground assault vehicles.  Moving around the base was a little more complicated that she had anticipated.  There were stormtroopers everywhere, usually moving in squads and only occasionally in pairs. Intellectually Jyn knew there were only 225 troopers, less the two they had taken out earlier, spread out over the one square klick of the base, but it felt like far more.  To make matters worse, the Empire didn’t seem to believe in the concept of darkness at night.  They had bright white lights blazing over the grounds to make up for the setting sun.  Jyn’s team had been hoping for the cover of darkness to help them move around undetected, but that notion went out the window as soon as they had crossed the gate.

With her heart in her throat after a couple of close calls, Jyn’s splinter team made it to the armory where she made quick work of the control panel to grant them access.  The guards posted inside quickly fell to blasterfire before they could sound an alarm of any kind.  Jett started loading as much of the ordinance as he could into some crates he found while Jyn and the Mirialan sniper set charges around the rest of the building.  Jyn still had no idea how they planned to get the crates out in any sort of timely manner, but that really wasn’t her problem.  She still had to make her way over to the comm tower so that she could transmit the message to the Moff who was supposedly having a fancy dinner on the system’s most well-known planet.  The message was the whole point of this exercise after all.

Jyn dodged around buildings and hid from squads of troopers in the darkest shadows she could find.  The part of her mind that was not focused on the mission at hand was wondering why the Empire felt it was necessary that all their soldiers move around in small groups at odd hours of the day.  She honestly had no idea where they were all going and what they were doing when they got there, all she knew was that they moved around like shining white herds of banthas.  Fortunately, they were just as loud so she could always hear them coming, but it made traversing the interior of the star shaped outpost into a deadly game of timing.

She made it to the tower, only having to disable a single, rather astonished young lieutenant who wasn’t required to move around the compound in packs like the soldiers.  The blast door at the base of the unit required a four digit alpha-numeric access code before it would let her in.  Luckily she was prepared for this.  From a pocket in her trousers she pulled one of the few little gadgets she had refused to part with when she sold the _Crystal Fire_ and quickly wired it into the control panel.  It was a tense three minute wait with Jyn clinging to the shadows of the small alcove created by the doorway while the device ran through the millions of options at lightning speed.  When the door finally slid open behind her she briefly hesitated, not knowing if it was better to detach the device or gain the extra seconds to surprise the techs sure to be on duty.  She opted for the latter, deciding that if everything went according to plan she should have the necessary time to retrieve it after she had finished her job.

Jyn poked just her head around the corner first to get a sense of what awaited her and decided that she could easily handle two bored looking communications technicians.  Since timing was of the essence and no one else appeared to be anywhere near the building, she opted to make short use of her blaster to dispose of the men.  Now came the tricky part.  The comm code for the Moff had to be located amidst all the Imperial files, then she had to transmit Car’das’ audio message overlaying a real time holo of the base exploding from the inside.  She tapped into security feeds from around the complex until she found one that would give the best view of the overall damage.  When Jyn had everything set to the point of just waiting for the night to light up, she double clicked her comlink to let the others know that she was in position and ready.  About a minute later there was another set of clicks and two minutes after that a third set.  Once the fourth set of clicks came she knew there was just thirty seconds until show time.

The simultaneous detonations rocked the earth beneath her and even inside the comm tower the sound was deafening.  She hoped the rest of the team had gotten far enough away from the blast otherwise she was going to have a hard time getting back into the city on her own.  The best part though was hearing the Moff’s reaction over the open comm channel. The message itself was simple and given in Car’das’ gruff, menacing voice, “You take from me, I take from you.  Now we’re square, Moff Vorru.”  Jyn couldn’t see Vorru’s face, but she could just imagine the look of bewilderment as he said, “What is this?  _Where_ is this?”

“Talus, sir.  It’s the outpost,” a second voice said in a tone that implied the man knew his Imperial career was over.

“Get your men on the line immediately, Commander! And someone prepare my shuttle for immediate departure!”

Jyn closed the channel with a grin and decided a quick exit would be prudent with the Moff on his way.  She made her way to the blast doors and removed her handy little gadget from the wiring of the control panel just as a skiff full of people and crates pulled around the corner.  She fired one shot on instinct, narrowly missing Jett’s head, before she realized it was her team, or what was left of them.  The green skinned Mirialan sniper Emari was conspicuously absent and Kol seemed to be slumped unconscious over a box of weapons.

“Run into some problems?” Jyn asked as she hopped onboard, Jett hitting the accelerator before she was even properly seated.

“Those TIEs pack a punch, even when they’re exploding and not firing at you,” Yrenne told her.

“Emari?” Jyn had to know.

“A couple of stormtroopers caught us by surprise,” Jett answered tersely.  Jyn swore under her breath.  It turned out she had the easy job.  She may not have known these people very long, and she may not have even liked them very much, but losing team members was never pleasant.

They rode the skiff out the gate farthest from the fiery wreckage where all the troopers were congregating, trying to figure out what had happened and attempting to stave off the attack Colm and Rendar were still mounting from beyond the perimeter.  It wasn’t quite a clean getaway.  Jyn and Yrenne did all they could to keep the troopers from firing at them or following them.  It was a good thing they had taken out all of their transports or the battered infiltration team wouldn’t have made it even halfway back to the city.  As it was Jyn had some concerns.

“This is an Imperial skiff right?  They probably have ways of tracking it,” she shouted over the rush of air in her face.  “We’ll have to ditch it.”

“Already on the schedule,” Jett yelled back.  “We’re heading to the speeder you got out here on.  We’ll offload the weapons and you can take them back to the safe house while I lead our Imperial friends on a merry little chase before I dump the skiff.”

“How do you plan to get back?” asked Yrenne.

“Colm and Rendar are picking me up.”

There was no more to say after that, they just had to hope they made it all the way back to Nashal in one piece.

The switch off went smoothly, all things considered.  The unconscious Zabrak was a bit inconvenient, but they managed to drape him across the crates in the back seat of the speeder. Those masquerading in armor shed their disguises and left the pieces lying in the tall grass.  The problems arose when they actually got into the city.  The streets were a bit narrow for practical speeder use, but they were also mostly empty, so that wasn’t the biggest challenge.  The main issue was that not all of the stormtroopers seemed to have been ensconced in the outpost when it went up in flames.  The patrols that were still out had been alerted to be on the lookout for the saboteurs.  Worse still, it seemed the Empire was cozy with the local Fed-Dub security forces and they too were searching for Jyn’s team.

“There’s no way we can get three huge crates of weapons into the residential area without anyone noticing,” Jyn whispered to Yrenne.  “We’ll have to stash them somewhere and go back for them when the manhunt has died down.”

The other woman agreed readily enough and wove her way through the city streets looking for an alleyway or some other inconspicuous dark corner to stack the crates in.  They eventually decided to use an alley near a cantina that was still bustling since their presence was less likely to be remarked upon if there were others hanging about, and they could use overt drunkenness as an excuse for having to carry Kol through the streets back to the house.  The crates of weapons were swiftly hidden behind a refuse bin and thoroughly covered with ragged looking tarps and lengths of canvas from the speeder.  It seemed that Jett had planned for this in some way.  Yrenne decided to ditch the speeder a block away from the cantina.  She reasoned that the troopers would be looking for a group in a speeder since it was how they had gotten away from the outpost.  Jyn was all for logic, but the dead weight of the Zabrak was not making it easy to move through the streets with any speed.

There was a close call when the three of them rounded a corner and practically ran into a pair of armed and angry stormtroopers.

“Halt! Where are you going and what happened to him?” one trooper demanded, his blaster level with Jyn’s face.

She had no immediate answer.  Jyn’s instinct was to fight, but the heavy weight of Kol leaning on her shoulder made it almost impossible for her to strike out at the trooper in any way that would actually make a difference.

“Relax there Stormy,” Yrenne said with an exasperated eye roll, “Our buddy here had too much to drink so we’re taking him home.  That a crime?”

Jyn didn’t know how the troopers would react to being called “Stormy” but that was the least of her worries.  The blaster in Jyn’s face was beginning to lower when the second trooper asked with deadly calm, “Then why is there blood on his face?”

“Because he was fighting,” Jyn answered quickly.  As she said it she locked eyes with a man passing behind the troopers across the street.  He was tall and well dressed with shiny boots and a clean shaven face.  “Some poncy git started insulting him and all the sudden they were swinging at each other.”  The man she was staring at took one tentative step closer to Jyn’s group and raised an eyebrow.

“That sounds convenient,” the trooper said icily, but Jyn and her staring partner had already had a silent conversation.  At the slightest of nods from Jyn the well-dressed man shoved a hand through his hair to muss it, pushed up his sleeves, and adopted a manner that was instantly loose and gave the appearance of alcohol induced recklessness.

“You don’t believe me, ask that bastard right there,” Jyn gestured with her head at the man behind the troopers.  “He’s the one that did it.”

The stormtroopers whirled around to face the new threat, but the man was just staring at Kol as though he had gotten no more than he deserved.  Really, whoever he was, he was good, Jyn had no qualms about admitting that.  He was quick on the uptake and able to make it believable.

“Do you know these people?” one trooper asked, blaster still held at the ready.

“Know them?  Certainly not,” the man said with a polished Core accent.  “Have I met them?  Unfortunately, yes.  They’re an uncivilized bunch of scoundrels and some of them less able to hold their liquor than others.”

The icy trooper looked back at Jyn and her comrades who were ever so slightly trying to edge away from the angry troopers, then back at the man.

“And who exactly are you?”

The man drew himself up to his full height and crossed his arms over his chest in a defiant gesture.  “I am Joreth Sward of the Diplomatic Corps, personal aide to a senator.”

That explained the fancy clothes and the pretty accent, but it didn’t explain why he was helping Jyn’s group.

“You got scandocs to prove it?”

“Of course,” the man scoffed and handed over a chip. 

The icy trooper ran it through a reader he removed from his utility belt and gave the information a careful scan.  “What’s an aide for the Senator of Taris doing here?”

“We were just on Coruscant and the Senator decided to make a stop on our way home.  She has friends here.  And I just wanted a drink where I wouldn’t have to listen to political prattle all night.”

The trooper who had completely lowered his weapon at this point gave the icy trooper a meaningful slap on the back. “Come on,” he said, “He’s not what we’re looking for.  Neither are they.  We’ve got better things to be doing.”

Icy trooper handed Joreth Sward his scandocs and seemed to glare in Jyn’s direction, even if the expression on his helmet couldn’t change.  “You want us to do anything with these troublemakers?” he asked the Senatorial aide.

“No, I think having to carry their comrade home by themselves is punishment enough.  He doesn’t look all that light a burden to me.”

“Fine.  You’re free to go.” The trooper then turned to Jyn’s group, “You too.  Move along.”

Jyn and Yrenne weren’t about to linger.  With a subtle nod of thanks to the helpful Joreth Sward, they half carried, half dragged the unconscious Zabrak away from the stormtroopers and in the direction of their safe house.

 

***

 

Cassian didn’t know what to expect when he arrived at the address that Sergeant Colm had left in his message, but he was not altogether surprised to find three blasters pointed at his chest and the young woman he had encountered the previous night.  He still couldn’t say what had made him stop when he saw a pair of stormtroopers accosting three slightly battered looking people in the street not far from a cantina he had spent no more than ten minutes in.  They had locked eyes over the shoulders of the troopers and he’d seen the fire in her gaze.  Her will and her desire to fight were apparent, but she was supporting a comrade over her shoulders and was essentially trapped.  Nothing about her begged for his help, rather she had dared him to come to their aid. 

So he had.  Some instinct had told him that he would not regret it.

Now here he was once again facing those hard gray-green eyes and trying to keep his hand from twitching to his own blaster in response to the three trained on him.

“Who are you?” asked a low voice from somewhere inside the small entryway.

Cassian didn’t quite know how he wanted to reply.  He didn’t know or trust any of those arrayed before him, nor was he certain yet that this dark haired, bright eyed woman whose presence seemed somehow larger than her slight stature was in fact the person he was seeking.  She did look something like the holo-rendering of Jyn Erso that had been burned into his mind in the last few weeks and he knew that the computer could only make a best guess at the realities of complex genetic permutations.  Despite his initial gut reaction that said _it has to be her,_ it didn’t seem wise to make any assumptions or give the motely group his real name.  The decision was ultimately taken from him by the girl studying him with narrowed eyes, her blaster arm steady as a rock.

“Well if it isn’t Senatorial aide Joreth Sward.  Our hero,” she said, not sounding particularly grateful.  “How did you find us?”

“I didn’t.  Not really,” he said falling into the smooth Core accent that went with Sward’s identity.  “I was given this address by Sergeant Colm.”

She raised an eyebrow at that.  “Sergeant, hmm?”  Her gaze finally moved passed him and surveyed the street beyond the door.  “Perhaps you’d better come in.”  She turned and signaled to the rest of her group that they could lower their weapons.

“How’s your friend?” Cassian asked as the door hissed shut behind him.

“Why do you ask?” said a tall pale woman with black hair and sharp tattoos sprawling over the side of her face.  Her posture was defensive and her dark eyes mistrusting.  Cassian couldn’t blame her.  He’d be incredibly suspicious of anyone showing up at his door when the local security forces in addition to the Empire’s soldiers were pounding the streets looking for someone. 

“Well he certainly didn’t get in a fight with me or anyone else in that cantina.  Given that he’s not standing here to greet me with the rest of you, I’m guessing his injuries are more extensive than a simple bruised jaw.  I’m not blind or deaf to what’s happened on Talus in the last few hours.  Call it a hunch, but something tells me you all know the reason for the plumes of smoke still rising from the Imperial outpost beyond the ridge.”

Every expression grew instantly wary and more than one blaster rose to face him again.  Cassian looked straight at the woman who might be Jyn Erso and spoke to her more than anyone else in the room.  “If I had wanted to turn you over, I never would have bothered to help you get away from those troops last night.”

He could see her considering his words and whether or not it was worth giving him the benefit of the doubt.  “He’ll live,” she eventually said in answer to his earlier inquiry.  “What are you doing here, Sward?”

He looked around him.  Cassian counted four people in the small hallway, and knew the injured Zabrak was probably resting somewhere unseen.  He didn’t like being so outnumbered when he couldn’t predict how any of them would react to anything he might say.  “I’m afraid you have me at a disadvantage,” he said to play for time, “You know my name, but I don’t know any of yours.”

“Do you need to?” a gruff looking middle-aged man asked.

“Probably not, but as I saved half of you last night, it might be nice.”

“Fair enough,” commented the pale woman as her eyes raked him up and down once more.  “I’m Yrenne, he’s Jett, that’s Dash Rendar on the stair-“

“Come on!  This is what I was talking about!” the man called Dash complained loudly.

The pale woman just raised her voice to speak over him “-and this bundle of joy is—“

“Liana Hallik,” the girl said crossing her arms in front of her defiantly.  “Why did the Rebellion send you?  I would have thought a little outpost like this not worth their attention.”

Now Cassian was the one who was suspicious.  How did she know he was with the Alliance?  Colm wouldn’t have mentioned it, such talk was against protocol.  His eyes narrowed as he studied Liana and her hostile posture.  She smirked like she could read his thoughts on his face despite the mask of calm he knew he wore.  “Sergeant,” she said, as though it was a damning piece of evidence.  Of course, he’d let Colm’s rank slip earlier, in fact it had been what got him through the door.  They must have known the man’s true allegiance all along.

He offered the slightest nod at her easy deduction.  “Where is Colm?  I’d like to speak with him.”

“He didn’t make it.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Why are you here?” Liana asked again.  The others in the room were watching the tense exchange, eyes moving between them as though watching some kind of odd dance.

“Sergeant Colm knew I was looking for someone and he thought she might be here.”

“What, did you lose your girlfriend or something, pretty boy?”

That jolted Cassian to his core.  In all his twenty-six years only two people had ever dared to call him by any sort of nickname, let alone that particular one.  He tried to quickly smother the shock that must have shown on his features for at least a moment as he studied her face more intently.  Something stirred in the back of his mind, another pair of blazing gray-green eyes on another world.  A smug smirk that met him again and again.  The fierce gaze was the same, but this young woman was almost certainly not the slicer Kestrel Dawn, nor the smuggler Tanith Pontha.  At least he didn’t think so.  Sure all three were fairly short and stubborn, but that was where the similarities ended.  Dawn had been bright and fairly open a lot of the time, with a dark edge of humor that snaked its way through her every interaction.  Tanith Pontha had been much more reserved and somber by comparison, no primary colors anywhere on her, not to mention the blonde hair. Yet she too had maintained a modicum of levity under pressure. 

This Liana Hallik looked hard, unforgiving, and most of all tired and beat down in a way he couldn’t imagine either of the other two being.  He also had a hard time picturing a slicer abruptly changing careers for the much more actively dangerous life of a smuggler or sabotaging an Imperial base from the inside.  People who spent the bulk of their time behind data terminals didn’t usually like to involve themselves in the more physical aspects of practical crime.  Although, he had to admit, that Dawn girl had been a pretty ruthless fighter. 

Was it possible? 

Could all three of these green eyed women actually be the same person, and could that person really be Jyn Erso?  He knew better than most that some people could wear names like clothes, casting aside old identities when their usefulness had faded.  If it was true, it would partially explain why he could find no trace of Jyn Erso anywhere.

Cassian eyed the woman for a moment trying to overlay the bright colors and copper hair of the slicer onto the hardened, straight-backed figure of the brunette in front of him.  He compared the posture of the smuggler to the stance of Liana Hallik.  His brow furrowed as his brain seemed to recognize something.

Then she shifted her weight and her wary expression changed, her eyebrows now communicating impatience.  Cassian shook his head to banish the fanciful image from his mind’s eye.  The galaxy was far too big for such a thing to happen.  He would focus on trying to verify her identity as Jyn Erso instead of getting caught up in the past.

“Girlfriend?” he said, finally venturing to answer her flippant question.  “No, not exactly.”

“Then I’m not really sure how we can help you, so you might as well go.  We’re a bit busy,” Liana said, attempting to usher him out the door.  He didn’t budge.

“Perhaps I can help you, all of you, somehow,” he said.  If it bought him some time to talk to the woman then he would do whatever he had to.  It was like seeing all the answers to his questions hovering before his eyes, but they were still out of focus.  He needed Liana Hallik to be Jyn Erso, but he also needed to be positive before he brought someone back to Alliance headquarters who seemed just as likely to turn around and sell their location to the highest bidder.

“I don’t see how.”  She gave him a once over as she said it, clearly finding the stiff, tailored clothing of Joreth Sward to be a general indication of his uselessness.

“Hold on there, Hallik,” said the man called Jett.  “Maybe we should hear him out.”

She scoffed, shook her head in disgust, then left the entryway.  He looked at the older man and raised an eyebrow in question.

“Don’t worry.  She’s like that with everyone,” said Jett with a companionable pat on the back.  Cassian followed him down the hall, the tall pale woman, Yrenne, and the swaggering Dash Rendar bringing up the rear.

Liana had seated herself in a corner chair so that she could glower her disapproval at them all from a safe vantage point.  The injured Zabrak lay stretched out on a couch, his face covered in a thin sheen of sweat.  The two men sat on chairs opposite the unconscious man, and the tattooed Yrenne hovered in the doorway.  It was not altogether the most welcoming of gatherings, but he’d suffered through worse.

“I still don’t see how he can help,” Liana muttered to her compatriots.

“You said yourself that he gave a convincing performance last night,” Jett said, giving Cassian a measuring look.  “Perhaps he has some hidden talents.”

The woman scoffed. “Please, he’s a low level Alliance politician of some kind.”

Cassian couldn’t help but raise his eyebrows at the apparent contradiction of her praise and her dismissal of him.  If she was Jyn Erso, she didn’t seem to have a high opinion of the Rebel Alliance.  Although, if she had spent several years with Saw Gerrera and his litany of complaints about the lack of action from Alliance High Command, then her attitude wasn’t all that surprising.  Her answering gaze was unrelenting, but after a few seconds he saw something in her eyes shift.  “Well, maybe you’re not,” she said so quietly Cassian mostly read it on her lips.  Her gaze turned quizzical then, her brow furrowing as she seemed to consider a new angle.  When her eyes lost their focus and her thoughts turned inward with a small frown tugging the corners of her mouth down, Cassian turned his attention back to the rest of the room’s occupants.

“He doesn’t look well,” he said with a gesture to the Zabrak.  “What’s wrong with him?”

The oddly familiar looking Rendar, frowned as he said, “We’re not really sure.  He hit his head in the blast and it knocked him out.  He woke up briefly when we removed some shrapnel from his leg then cleaned it as best we could.  He’s only been sweating like this for the last hour or two.”

“Probably an infection and possibly a concussion. I’ve seen it before,” Cassian said.

“We need medical supplies,” Jett told him.  “You offered to help, right?  Well, if you can get us a decent medkit then maybe we can help you find who you’re looking for.”

Cassian threw a quick glance at Liana who was still eyeing him cautiously from her corner before agreeing.

“Then I’ll go with you,” Liana announced.

“You will?” Rendar asked in confusion.

“I’m not about to trust some stranger who knows our location to wander off into the city where troops are looking for us.  I’d rather keep an eye on him.”

“Hallik, the whole point of him going and not us is so that we don’t get caught,” Jett said, trying to reason with her.  “I thought we agreed to lay low until the search dies down.”

She gave the man a cutting look.  “I’ll be careful.”

Jett threw his hands up in the air in exasperation.  “Don’t blame me if something happens,” he said and leaned back in his seat with a scowl.

“No time like the present, shall we?” Cassian asked standing up.  Liana gave a firm nod of the head, grabbed something out of her bag, and rose to follow him.          

When they got outside he saw that being careful meant wrapping a scarf over her head which would only partially conceal her identity.  As the old smuggler had said, it was her gamble so he didn’t comment on her paltry precautions.  Cassian didn’t know precisely where to go, but he figured the shopping district would have what they needed, and that meant a walk of a klick or so.

After a few streets had passed under their boots, one pair dirty and well-worn the other knee high and shining, Cassian decided to break the silence.  He wasn’t usually one for idle conversation, but he didn’t think he was going to get a better opportunity to talk to Liana Hallik and verify his suspicions about her true identity.

“Do you mind if I ask how you ended up here?” he started casually.

She offered him a small smile.  “Believe it or not, last night’s events were not my idea.  In fact, I tried to get out of coming to Talus altogether, but you see how well that worked out.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Paying off a debt.”

“That must have been quite a debt,” Cassian said with raised eyebrows.

She shrugged like blowing up an Imperial base, even a small one, was no big request.  “It is what it is, and now it’s done.”

So much for that line of inquiry.  Liana Hallik was clearly not someone who parted with personal information lightly.  As an Intelligence officer Cassian approved of such habits, but as an Intelligence officer _on a mission_ it was a difficult obstacle to work around.  He would have to find a way to get her to open up.  Before he could try again she offered up something on her own.

“You know, Kol is lucky you came along.  If it had been up to me, he’d probably end up dying on that couch.”

“Do you care so little for his life?”

“It’s not that.  Besides, Jett or Rendar would have gone out to get something to help eventually.”

“But not you,” said Cassian.  It wasn’t a question.

“Perhaps,” she said with equanimity.  “Where I was raised the mission came first, so if you were injured and pulling you out or getting help put the successful completion of the mission at risk then you had to help yourself, or be killed.  Those who fell behind, were usually left behind.  Not always, mind you, if good medical care was to be had, then someone might come back to help, but good medical care was rare.”

“Sounds like a harsh way to live,” Cassian said.  He couldn’t quite imagine it himself.  Sometimes the Rebellion found themselves in similar dire circumstances, but they were all soldiers, all family on the battlefield.  No one wanted to be left behind, so you, in turn, tried not to abandon your fellows.  In the intelligence game there was always a chance that you got in too deep somewhere that an extraction proved impossible, or you slipped up and got caught.  Cassian knew the look of remorse or regret that General Draven wore when he was forced to consign an operative to death in the field.  It was never an easy decision to make.  Whatever rules of life Liana had known sounded much worse.

“Maybe, but it was usually more of a mercy to shoot those whose injuries limited their mobility in the field than to risk them getting picked up by the Imps or dragging them back to base where they were probably just going to die slowly and in pain from lack of decent living conditions and care.  It’s not that Saw didn’t care about his men, he did.  But he cared about the cause and his dream more.”

“It’s not like that everywhere.”  He thought it was important that she knew that.  If she were to go with him to the Rebellion there would be people who would remark on her absence, or help pick her up when she fell.  If they didn’t look after their own, the ranks of the Alliance would have dwindled to nothing long ago.  They didn’t have the same kind of numbers as the Empire who had so many faces aboard their Star Destroyers or in their bases that people turned into numbers, just another cog in the Imperial war machine.

They were each lost in their thoughts for a moment.  Cassian didn’t know if he should press his point about the Rebellion, _his_ Rebellion, not Saw’s extremist and sometimes cruel cell that roamed the Mid Rim.  For Liana had let it slip in her story that she had grown up with Saw Gerrera and that tallied with his best guesses of when Galen Erso had disappeared from most records.  But he still didn’t know why she had gone to Saw, whether it was forced or voluntary.  He didn’t know if she had any idea of where her father was and what he was doing for the Empire.

“So who is it you’re looking for?”

The question startled him out of his thoughts.  Cassian hadn’t expected her to care who he was after, but he supposed she could be allowed a small interrogation of her own.  Still, he glanced at her, unsure of how much to say.  If this woman was indeed Jyn Erso, then she was going by a different name for a reason.  He didn’t know if it was to run from the law, her father, or herself.  He decided to hedge his bets.  “I’m actually looking for a man, a scientist, but he’s proving a difficult quarry to track down.  I’m hoping his daughter might be able to help me find him.”

Liana tensed up next to him and her eyes became guarded, but her face was otherwise expressionless.  “What makes you think she can help?” she asked in a tone that didn’t quite achieve idle curiosity.  “Not everyone keeps in touch with their parents and not all parents or guardians care enough to stay in contact with their children.”

Such a statement savored heavily of bitter experience.  He wondered which category she fell into, perhaps both.  The look on her face said it would be unwise to ask.

“I have to hope she’s kept tabs on her father, one way or another, and that she’ll be willing to share.”

A wry smile twisted her lips. “You hope? Don’t hold your breath.”

They walked on in silence for another few minutes.  It wasn’t a companionable quiet, nor was it tense, it was merely purposeful.  Cassian kept one eye out for a storefront that looked like it would sell basic medical supplies and split the rest of his attention on the woman at his side and the growing crowd on the streets.  Her words troubled him.  They implied she either didn’t know where Galen Erso was, or that she would be unwilling to tell the Alliance if she did.  He wasn’t sure which would be worse.  Liana Hallik was a walking contradiction, one that he couldn’t get a handle on.  If he could find what drove her, what lit that fire in her eyes, then he could use that to his advantage.  It might help him to understand why right now she seemed determined to find what they needed to help the Zabrak, despite her earlier words about not being inclined to help her fallen comrade.  He didn’t know what had changed her mind or why her bright eyes dared anyone to stand in her way.

On the street, however, something seemed off.  The natural tide of pedestrians was interrupted in a way that he couldn’t put his finger on.  Not yet.  But this was a problem he could solve.

“Here, this place looks promising,” Liana said breaking into his study of the street and pointing to a small shop on their left.

She entered the store, unaware of the potential danger in the street.  Cassian stood outside the window for an extra minute trying to sort through what he saw.  There it was, a few storefronts down back in the direction they had come from, there were two men in gray uniforms that bore an emblem he didn’t recognize.  They weren’t Empire, so they were probably local law enforcement of some kind.  One of the men was flashing a holo of a face at people in the street and occasionally going inside the shops, presumably to do the same thing.  Most of those they interrogated shook their heads, but a few shrugged their shoulders and waved down the street in the general direction that Liana and Cassian had gone in.  He couldn’t tell from this distance who the person in the holo was, but he had a bad feeling that it was Liana Hallik.

Oddly enough, hidden underneath the feeling of foreboding the two men engendered, there was a twist of familiarity.  He suddenly recalled a time in a cantina on Toprawa and another set of troops looking for Kestrel Dawn, who really did resemble Liana Hallik in small ways.  He couldn’t think about that now.  Cassian had to make sure they got what they needed and left before the two men reached this shop.  If they were quick, he and Liana could escape through the backstreets, but only if they hurried.

“Liana,” he said coming up beside her as she browsed through a stock of antiseptic and antibiotic sprays and creams.  She already had a package of bacta patches under her arm.  She only half turned her head to him as he continued.  “I think it would be best if you were quick about this.  There may be trouble coming.”  She looked up then, studied his face, and then nodded before turning back to the medical supplies.

Cassian remained by the window to keep an eye on the progress of the security men while Liana put together the supplies.  It was making him anxious.  He would lose sight of them for a few moments as the crowd swelled around them or as they moved in and out of the shops lining the street.  Soon Cassian determined his vantage point through the transparisteel wasn’t good enough.  The glare of the mid-morning sun combined with the reflections from inside were making it even harder to follow two men in nondescript gray.

“I’ll be right back,” he told Liana in a low voice and then he slipped out the door and into the foot traffic.

The problem with gray, Cassian decided, was that it was too common.  Stormtroopers in their pristine white armor were easy to pick out in a crowd.  The gray of local law enforcement on Talus blended into the general surroundings and despite years of training and experience, Cassian still managed to lose track of them.  He had half a mind to station himself on the street to intercept the men and point them in the wrong direction if necessary.  Of course, that plan would only work if he could find them so that he could put himself in the most plausible location.

He was still scanning the street when the soundscape behind him changed.  He heard the distinct grunts and muffled thumps of a scuffle coming from the direction of the store where Liana still lingered.

 _No._   He felt an icy prickle of fear run through his body at the thought of her being captured.  If she was Jyn Erso, what might the Empire do to her if they caught her?  He turned around, not knowing how the local goons had gotten past him so completely and saw something worse than local law enforcement.  The sight of a bright, gleaming white stormtrooper pursuing Liana met his eyes and he froze for just a moment.  He must have been so focused on looking for gray in one direction of the street that he had missed the more obvious and probably more dangerous threat approaching from the other side.

Liana had some kind of cloth bag slung over her shoulder, probably the medical supplies, as she tried to outrun the trooper.  He fired a stun bolt at her back, which she dodged, but a passing pedestrian did not.  A body slumped to the ground as Liana whirled around into a crouch and swept her leg beneath the troopers’ and he toppled to the ground.  She grabbed the blaster out of his hands and sent a stunner at a second white clad figure pushing his way out the door before crashing the weapon into the head of the trooper at her feet.  Cassian was too far away to help and the crowd was moving against him, but he had a moment of thinking it didn’t matter, that she was home free and would be able to get away.  She certainly bolted fast enough and that was when Cassian finally spotted the men in gray uniforms.  Drawn to the commotion in the street, they were headed toward the scene and Cassian watched in horror as Liana ran straight into them.  He fought his way through the crowds at a run now, pushing aside anyone who crossed his path. 

He still wasn’t fast enough. 

Liana managed to knock one of the men down with her own momentum, but before she could get her feet under her again the second stuck her with a stun prod.  Liana jerked and fell back to the ground in a shocked heap.  With her wits momentarily scrambled, the officer was able to encircle her wrists in stuncuffs and Cassian was too late to do anything about it.  He kept moving forward though, unsure of what to do.  The two stormtroopers were out and no one seemed particularly eager to help them so all he would have to do is deal with the gray uniformed men who he could tell worked for Fed-Dub, now that he was closer.  The problem was the crowded street.  He would have to help Liana get away without making a spectacle of himself.

When the downed officer began to rise he hauled the woman up with him.  Before he turned her around to march her away she found Cassian in the crowd.  Her expression was hard and her eyes said _well, do something!_   He tried to assure her without words that he wasn’t going to let them take her far.

Cassian studied the terrain and thought through his assets.  He really wished Kay were with him at the moment, but he had decided to have Kay watch the ship.  He also didn’t think someone potentially running from the Empire would have a great reaction to an Imperial security droid showing up on their doorstep, reprogrammed or not.  Given the manhunt for the little group that Cassian had found all too easily, Kay’s tall, imposing figure would have invited a “shoot first, questions later” type of response.  Even if he commed Kay now, the droid couldn’t get to this part of the city fast enough to help.

Cassian followed in the wake of the two Fed-Dub men and the woman he hoped was Jyn Erso and tried to figure out how to get a good angle on them without putting any civilians at risk.  He was going to have to shoot them discreetly, but from where?  He glanced up at the buildings around him and saw they had small stairways or ladder rungs built into the sides that led to balconies and rooftops.  He immediately picked up his pace and surpassed his target group so that he could get up to the lowest rooftop three buildings ahead, reconfigure his gun with the interchangeable parts that were hidden in his boots and in pouches on his belt, and set up for two sniper shots before they passed out of range.  Cassian wasn’t the best long range shot in the Rebellion, but he was only a couple down from the top.  If he could get set up in time, he should have no problem hitting his targets.

As he quickly climbed to the top of a store that seemed to sell plants, of all things, he brushed away the little voice in the back of his head that said the men he was about to shoot weren’t of the Empire.  They were local units roped into doing the Empire’s dirty work when the Emperor decided he wanted Corellia and her shipyards as part of his collection.  As Cassian added a longer barrel to his blaster, attached a scope, and slotted a stabilizing stock onto the end, he sought to silence the voice by deciding that these men were Imperial by association at the moment, and furthermore, they were interfering with his mission.  He would revisit this decision later when he sat behind the controls of his ship in the silence of hyperspace where there weren’t enough distractions to occupy his mind.  He always revisited this type of decision.  But for right now, his mind provided all the justification he needed to unerringly take up position on the roof.

His first shot hit its mark and caused several people around the man to gasp or shout in surprise as he fell forward onto his knees, a small curl of smoke rising from the scorch mark on his jacket.  The second shot, a mere eight seconds after his first, sent the crowd into a panic.  When both of the Fed-Dub men were down Liana took off running without a backward glance.  Cassian didn’t stop to watch how things on the street unfolded.  Instead, he quickly attached a strap that he pulled from a small pouch on his belt to his newly constructed rifle so that he could settle the weapon across his back and abandoned his rooftop perch.  The chaotic movement of the crowd masked his retreat as he followed after Liana without anyone noticing.  He hoped having her hands cuffed would slow her down enough for him to catch up with her, but he didn’t think he’d be that lucky.  He sprinted as fast as he could down the street making turns that would lead him back to the small house he had found Liana and her colleagues in not more than two hours ago.  If she wasn’t heading to the residential area then he would have no idea where to look for her, though with the stuncuffs binding her hands her options would be limited.

Cassian rounded a corner and found himself immediately thrown backward into a wall with enough force to bruise in the places where the blaster on his back dug into his flesh.  His head had also hit the wall and he gazed down at his attacker through slightly cloudy eyes.  Liana Hallik had him pinned with a forearm across his neck, her other arm up at an odd angle because of the cuffs.  Some part of Cassian’s mind blearily noted that she must have been on tiptoe to achieve the position.

“Oh, it’s you,” she said sounding surprised and not nearly as out of breath as he would have expected.  She stepped back and lowered her arms so that Cassian could ease himself from the wall.

He rubbed his head gingerly, making sure there was no blood.  “What was that for?” he hissed at her.

She looked completely unapologetic.  “I heard someone chasing me, but I couldn’t tell who it was.  What did you expect?”

He grimaced at her logical answer and waved her forward. “Come on, let’s get those off.  And we should find something to hide your face.”

The options for disguises were thin where they were, but about two blocks away the edges of the distraught crowd were still in view.  “Stay here,” he instructed her and handed her his blaster with a stern look of warning that spoke of dire consequences should she run off and take it with her.  It took him a few minutes to locate an appropriate cloak that looked easy enough to liberate.  It was laying over a low wall next to a couple who were examining a rather raw and bloody looking knee and elbow that had probably been incurred in the panic.  Cassian simply walked by grasping a fistful of cloak and letting it pull away from the wall as though it were natural and meandered back to Liana.  He traded the garment for his blaster and worked on disassembling the rifle parts while she judged his choice of disguise.

“Are you serious?” Liana asked with disdain.  “A cape.  Where do you think I’m going? To the opera on Coruscant?”

“It has a hood.  Just put it on.”

“There wasn’t anything else?”

“No,” he said calmly.  “It was that or nothing.  Do you feel lucky enough to roam the streets undisguised?”

Now it was her turn to grimace at his words.  She reluctantly wrapped the cloak around her shoulders and pulled the hood up.  “You know they weren’t Empire right?” she asked as he stowed the last of his blaster parts in his boot and started to walk off again.

“I know,” he said tightly.  “I did what I had to.  Would you have preferred to go to jail?”

“Not really.  Prison and I don’t agree,” she said with finality.

They moved at a brisk pace but not a run.  They wanted to look like everyone else who had decided that today was not the day for shopping and staying in was proving the safer course of action after the events in the street.  Without talking about it, both he and Liana seemed to decide to take the most circuitous route possible back to the team’s hideout to help throw off anyone who had ideas of following them.  Once they were a safe distance from the disarray behind them Cassian ventured to break the silence.  There was one major problem with everything that had just happened and he wondered if Liana was aware of it.

“You know that they recognized you right?” Cassian hissed at her.  “Those Fed-Dub guys, and probably the stormtroopers too, had a holo of you that they were flashing at people and asking if anyone had seen you.  Why did they have a holo of you?”

“That’s not possible!  I wiped everything when…when…” she trailed off, her face scrunched up in concentration.  “Kriffing hell! The comm tower.  I forgot to wipe the feed from the comm tower because everything was exploding and the Moff was on his way.  How could I forget?” she asked in frustration

That would certainly make things harder, but her answer told him that the troopers only had her picture and not her name.  It was a small relief.  “Mistakes happen,” he told her, “Just be glad I was there to help.”

“I generally prefer not to make such deadly mistakes.”

“At least you grabbed the supplies before you ran out,” Cassian said.  He had actually been surprised she had the presence of mind to do so while under attack.  “It wasn’t all for nothing.”

“I suppose.”

The silence stretched between them once again as they carefully made their way through the city.  As they walked the buildings began to change shape and small patches of greenery turned into the occasional corner park or festive pots of flowers on a balcony or outside windows.  They were entering the residential area of this side of Nashal and getting closer to their goal with every step, which meant Cassian’s window to talk with the woman walking beside him was closing.

“Where will you go when you leave Talus?” Cassian asked.  “Because you should probably get offworld sooner rather than later.”

Liana sighed like Cassian had asked an impossible question, then shrugged trying to hide her fatigue.  “Somewhere.  Anywhere.  I’m definitely getting out of the Core, there are far too many Imps in these parts for my liking.”

“You could help change that.”  She just raised an eyebrow and waited for him to explain himself.  “You should come with me, back to the Alliance.  You’re a good fighter, I just saw that, and if you managed to get in and out of that outpost unscathed, then I know you have other skills we could use.  We always need good slicers, and something tells me you’re better than most when explosions aren’t distracting you.”

“You want me to join the Rebellion?” she huffed out a humorless laugh.  “That’s rich.  What has the Alliance ever done for me, aside from make my life into a string of never ceasing skirmishes?  I already spend my days and nights watching my back for the Empire, or bounty hunters, or just common people who have been made desperate by a power struggle that’s strangling the galaxy.  I have no desire to put a glowing target on my chest for them to aim at. ”

“But it doesn’t have to be like that.  The Alliance can help, you’ll have the resources you need to stay one step ahead.  You can have a place to go back to, a place to call home.”

“I know just what type of resources the Rebellion has, and I can tell you it’s not enough.  It will never be enough.  You’ve heard the rumors haven’t you?  About a weapon?”  He could only nod.  Cassian himself was actively chasing those rumors, trying to get to their source, trying to find the truth behind them all.  “I don’t know what it is, but I know the Empire isn’t going to hold back and they’re not going to stop until the whole galaxy is forced under their boot.  How am I supposed to fight against that?” 

There was so much emotion in her voice, and so much terror.  He was amazed at such an admission of fear.  She looked too strong to be so scared of anything, there was too much fire in her for it to be so focused on her own well-being.  How could he explain to her that fighting back, that the Alliance and all it stood for was the only hope that some people had left in the universe.  Cassian didn’t know what he would be without the cause.

“If we give up then there will be no one to stop the Empire from killing off whole species, or enslaving entire worlds.  If we give up there will be nothing left,” he said quietly.

“I haven’t given up,” she said through gritted teeth.

“It sounds like you have.”

“No, I haven’t.  I just,” she paused, searching for words. “I don’t know how to fight without—“  She stopped herself abruptly and seemed to collect all her fraying strands of thought in just one breath.  “It doesn’t matter.  I’ll do what I have to in order to survive and if that means sometimes I have to take out an Imperial outpost, then I will.  If it means I have to lay low in the Outer Rim, then I will.”

“And what if someone asked you to stand up and fight?”  He almost asked what if _he_ had asked her, but Cassian didn’t mean anything to her even if he felt he knew something about who this woman was and how she had lived her life to this point.  He had been looking for her for months so she already meant something to him.  She was a chance to find Galen Erso, her father, and stop him, or at least learn what he was building for the Empire.  This spitfire woman who was quick to throw a punch and seemed to have a survival instinct that did not always align with the greater good, this young woman was his only hope, at least for now.

He chose to set aside the part of him that insisted that someone who grew up with Saw and his personal rebellion would never abandon the cause.  If she was Jyn Erso then something had to have happened to make her so mistrustful of the Alliance or of fighting _with_ someone.  Cassian suspected that she had been on the cusp of the matter before she had stopped herself. 

Liana Hallik, or maybe Jyn Erso, he was nearly certain of it now, looked him right in the eye and said, “It would depend on who did the asking.”

The small argument had taken them right up to the door of the small house that was the base of her team’s operations on Talus.  She punched in a code and the door slid open.

“Liana what happened to—“

“Just drop it,” she growled, cutting him off and storming down the hall.  He followed and watched as she dumped her bag of med supplies at Jett’s feet, turned right around, glaring at the world, and left the room.  Her angry footfalls could be heard on the stairs heading for the upper rooms.

“I take it you two had a fun outing then?” Jett asked with raised brows.

“There was a small patch of trouble in town,” replied Cassian.

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably not, but I would advise against leaving or answering the door for a while.”

“Great,” Jett said looking disappointed. “I guess I won’t be going to get extra provisions later.”

Just then Rendar swaggered into the room and leaned against a wall affecting far too casual an air for Cassian’s liking.  “Oh good.  I heard stomping and figured you were back.  Anyone for a round or two of sabacc?  Yrenne’s been threatening to clean me out, but I doubt she’s as good as she says she is.  Where is she anyway?  It would defeat the purpose to play without her.”

Cassian tried not let his disgust or disbelief show, but Jett had no such reservations.  He rolled his eyes and shook his head before picking up the bag at his feet and pulling out the contents. 

“I’ll go find something to clean the wound with one more time before you bandage him up,” said Cassian.  He would be useful until Liana had cooled down enough to rejoin her colleagues so that he could try to convince her to go with him under her own auspices one more time.

 

***

 

Jyn was frustrated with herself and her whole general situation.  She knew she wasn’t behaving with the most maturity at the moment, but she couldn’t seem to snap herself out of it.  She had slipped up both on the mission and just now while talking to Joreth Sward and that made her angry at her own carelessness.  Jyn didn’t want to think that she’d gotten sloppy, but she couldn’t deny that she’d had more close calls with the Empire and bounty hunters in the last four months than in all the previous few years since Saw left her behind in a bunker.  She didn’t know if it was because her eye for guerilla tactics and her strategic mind, able to adapt on the fly to whatever hellfire she happened to find herself in, had landed her in a few situations that involved underground resistance cells on a number of different Imperial occupied worlds, or if it was because the Empire was actively looking for Jyn Erso again, or if she really was just making too many mistakes.

At the very least, it certainly seemed like the Rebellion was looking for her, if this Sward character was anything to go by, though she couldn’t imagine why.  It could have been possible that Saw was looking for her, but he didn’t often look backwards and she was definitely in his past.  She wasn’t sure how to ask Sward without giving anything else away and more to the point she was annoyed with him.

It bothered her that she couldn’t see more of his motives.  She was usually pretty good at reading people.  For instance, Jyn knew that Joreth Sward was not his real name.  He had worn it well in the beginning, but the more she watched him and the more they talked, the more he reminded her of someone else she had known with a name she barely remembered, but she knew it wasn’t Sward.  There was something in the warm brown of his eyes that held a note of familiarity, yet he looked wrong.  It was as though something was missing, maybe a moustache or a beard.  Jyn knew from experience that a person could change their name, their clothes and hair, the way they walked and talked, but their eyes were always their own.  This man’s eyes tugged at her in determined flashes, earnest pleas, and fleeting hopeful glances. 

It had completely taken her off guard.

While she was distracted, he had managed to slip past her walls to knock loudly and insistently at the hatch to the dark cave of memories at the back of her mind.  He spoke of finding a home with the Rebellion and that rankled in a way she couldn’t explain.  In an effort to drown out the echoes of the past she had latched on to her anger and hurled it back at Sward.  She let fly with her anger at the Empire, at the Rebellion, at Saw, at her father, and even at her mother who had been just the first in a long line of people to abandon her.  She had said things about Saw and her own history that leaked out of her mind and into her words and now she couldn’t take them back.  If this man and the Rebellion were really looking for her – how many scientist’s daughters could be that important to the Alliance after all – then a clever man would now have enough to piece together her true identity.

Sward, whoever he really was, had been right.  Jyn needed to get off Talus soon, but it certainly wouldn’t be with him so that she could fall into the waiting arms of the Rebellion.  The flaw in that plan, of course, being that she lacked her own ship.  With the stormtroopers and the Fed-Dub agents combing the streets for her there was no way she would be able to buy passage offworld.  That left stealing a ship or her teammates as her only options for transport away from the Core.

“Hmm, you’re back,” said a silky voice from Jyn’s doorway, halting her thoughts about her planetside trouble.  She looked up at the pale, exotically tattooed woman who was studying her as she said, “The politician mentioned a spot of trouble.  Anything I should be worried about?”

Jyn snorted at the concept of Sward being a politician.  The man carried a multi-function blaster and its attendant parts on him at all times and he was apparently a decent sniper.  She’d never even heard of another politician who met those criteria let alone met one.  All in all, the man was adding up to be an Alliance Intelligence officer, a realization that further fueled the discomforting feeling of having met him before.  She suddenly recalled a tight grip on her arms and heat on her lips followed by warm eyes and a smirk all swallowed by a crisp black uniform.  Jyn shook her head to clear it.

She really needed to get away from Sward, out of Nashal, and off Talus.  Jyn eyed the woman waiting in her doorway.  Maybe Yrenne could help with that.

“Nothing to be concerned with.  How did you get here?  To Talus I mean,” Jyn clarified when Yrenne raised a questioning eyebrow.

“I have a ship,” she told Jyn carefully.  “Why?”

“I think I’ve worn out my welcome in the Corellian System and I got here on registered transport.”

“Ah,” the woman said neutrally.

Jyn sighed.  “I don’t have much, but I’ll pay if that’s what you’re after.”

Yrenne’s pale face broke into a feral grin.  “How about you help in another way?”  Jyn waited for her to elaborate, worried at what that grin signified.  “You remember those weapons we stashed?  The old smuggler was right, they’ll fetch a hefty price from the right people.”

“I do have some contacts that would be interested in buying,” Jyn said speculatively.

“I thought you might.”

“Still, getting those three crates through the city to whichever spaceport you’re docked at won’t be easy or all that inconspicuous.”

Yrenne shrugged.  “We don’t need all three.  Jett, Rendar, and Kol should get something for their troubles.  And you seem to be able to handle yourself.  I’m sure you’ll figure out a way to move the weapons.”

“Hang on,” Jyn said, unhappy with the way this plan was unfolding.  “I’m the one they’re looking for, don’t you think it makes more sense if I slip past spaceport security and prep the ship?”

“And risk you flying off with the _Sabre_ and stranding me?” Yrenne said derisively.  “I don’t think so.”

Jyn scowled.  The thought had crossed her mind, but she hadn’t really considered it as a real option.  She had another problem with Yrenne’s idea, however. “Those cargo crates are in a fixed location which means you’ll know exactly where I’ll be and when.  How do I know you won’t just sell me out?”

“I guess you’re just going to have to trust me.”

Jyn crossed her arms over her chest defiantly.  “Not likely.”

They stared each other down, each willing the other to give in, Jyn with a stubborn set to her jaw, and Yrenne with a slight expression of disdain twisting her features.

“Either we do all of it together,” Jyn began.

“Or not at all?” the pale woman finished, a question in her voice.

“It will take two of us to move those crates anyway, even if we only take one.”

“I suppose you’re right,” Yrenne gave in with a sigh.  “But I’m warning you Hallik, if you get caught don’t expect me to take any blaster bolts for you.  You’re on your own.  Karrde still owes me for this job and I intend to be around to collect.”

Jyn actually smiled at the mercenary’s words.  She couldn’t fault the woman for looking out for herself first.  It’s what Jyn would do.  “One last thing,” Jyn said to her new business partner, “Sward.  We’ll have to get rid of him or make sure he doesn’t notice when we go.”

That made the woman’s brow furrow.  “Why?”

“He has some ridiculous notion of taking me to join the Alliance and I wouldn’t put it past him to interfere to make that happen.”

“So when you say ‘get rid of him…’” Yrenne trailed off letting the question hang in the air.

“No, we don’t need to kill him.  He just needs to be out of the house when we go.”

“In the evening then, so we have the cover of darkness.  If Sward hasn’t gone by then, I’ll find some way to convince him to be elsewhere.”

 

***

 

Jyn was more relieved than she would ever admit that Yrenne didn’t end up having to get the Rebellion officer out of the small living accommodations Karrde had rented for their use.  She wasn’t quite sure that the mercenary woman wouldn’t have just killed Sward anyway.

Both of the women had rejoined the group after their scheming session to find Kol conscious and carefully drinking a bit of water under Jett’s watchful eye while Rendar sulked gloomily in a corner with a datapad in hand.  Sward, on the other hand, was in the kitchen cooking, of all things.  It was possibly the most astonishing thing Jyn had seen since she had watched Jabba the Hutt sentence some poor soul to death by rancor.

She had watched Sward for a few moments before coming to the conclusion that he knew what he was doing.  She was absolutely stunned.

“Does the Alliance teach all its –“ she hesitated for only a moment as he looked up and caught her eye with an expression that was half warning and half curiosity.  She diverted her sentence on instinct, somehow knowing he wouldn’t appreciate her announcing her deduction that he was part of Alliance Intelligence in current company.  “-politicians and their aides to cook?”

“No, but I prefer my food to have flavor when I can manage it,” he told her with a small smile.  “The droids that work in the mess hall make everything to meet nutritional standards and not necessarily taste standards.  Several years ago I started sneaking into the kitchens after hours in order to make myself something decent on occasion when I was on base.  I actually enjoy cooking.”

Jyn could tell she was staring at him like he was crazy because his lips slowly pulled into a full smile and his eyes lit up with amusement.

“You know, your description of Rebellion food doesn’t really do much to sell the concept of joining up to me.”

He acknowledged her comment with a nod.  “Perhaps not.  Sometimes, though, the truth is more important than the usual recruitment pitch.”

Jyn could appreciate that and even kind of agreed with it.  The idea of various Rebels making time for themselves to cook made them seem more like real people and not just a nebulous group of righteous freedom fighters.  She wasn’t sure if that was a good thing.  It made it harder to be angry at them.

She couldn’t seem to tear her gaze away from Sward as he worked.  He moved smoothly about the cramped space chopping one minute and stirring the next.  A smile played about his lips the whole time and he moved with the same precise surety as he had when helping her flee custody earlier that day.

And all of the sudden Jyn was hit with a wave of _wanting_ like she hadn’t experienced in years.  It was a desire for a place to belong.  A place where the simple act of cooking could bring a smile to the face of someone as efficient and goal oriented as Joreth Sward, Rebel Intelligence officer who did whatever was necessary to accomplish his mission.

She hadn’t realized how much she had missed communal meals in the last few years.  Mealtimes growing up on Lah’mu weren’t anything special, they were merely a time for family.  Neither Galen nor Lyra had been a great cook, but the food was fresh and better than a lot of the things she would be forced to eat later in her life.  Occasionally they would supplement their usual fare with something Galen had actually managed to coax out of the earth.  He would smile proudly at the bit of green or a pile of vegetables on his plate and then turn shining eyes on Jyn, “What do you think, Stardust?”

Meals among Saw’s cadre had been about camaraderie on good days and surviving on the bad ones.  It was bowls of warm stew passed around a fire or a package of flat tasteless crackers shared through a cramped room.  There was often drinking and jokes, they would berate the Empire or remember the fallen.  Mostly, those meals had let Jyn know that she wasn’t alone in the fight.

Everything changed when Saw abandoned her in a bunker at the age of sixteen.  Jyn ate alone and she ate what was at hand, quick and easy.  Flavor and content didn’t matter as much as satisfying the pangs of hunger in her stomach.  It wasn’t all bad.  Her days as Kestrel and Tanith had seen a number of decent meals in cantinas, restaurants, or cafés on a dozen different worlds.  Lately, however, she really only ate what was necessary for survival.

Sward had finally noticed her staring and quirked an eyebrow.  “Did you want to help?” he asked.

Jyn backed away wide eyed, her hands held up as if in surrender.  She had many skills, but cooking was emphatically not one of them.  “That’s really not a good idea if you don’t want everyone to die of food poisoning,” she said and retreated to the other side of the room to join in a game of sabacc that Rendar was enthusiastically organizing.

It was sometime after everyone had eaten the unfairly delicious meal and once the sun had begun to set over the horizon that Sward received some kind of message that had him hurrying out the door.  Naturally, Jyn aimed one last quip at him about the team not needing a babysitter, but he had promised to return in an hour anyway.  When the door had hissed shut behind him, Jyn’s gaze found Yrenne’s and they silently agreed that this was the opening they were looking for.  Now they just had to get out of the house without arousing the suspicions of everyone else.

Jyn went first, claiming a need for sleep due to the day’s earlier excitement and went up the stairs.  She grabbed her small bag of clothes and handy slicing gadgets and headed for a window at the end of the hall.  It looked out over a neighboring rooftop that she would be able to scramble down.  The plan was for the other woman to simply walk out the front door with whatever excuse she deemed appropriate.  It was all too easy.

Working on the assumption that the streets were still being patrolled, Jyn was careful about how she moved down the street to their rendezvous spot.  She didn’t know how far from the busier city center down by the river the patrol routes would extend, but she didn’t want to take any more risks than necessary.  The cantina they had stashed the boxes behind was on the edge of the residential sector and still a good way from the riverside hangar where Yrenne’s ship waited.  They slipped warily through the shadows as quietly as possible.  Jyn had opted to leave the ridiculous cloak behind as its length hampered her movement.  She was also keeping her eyes open for a suitable, open-cockpit speeder.

It was slim pickings in these parts, but she found something eventually.  It was an older model with chipping green paint and a sun faded interior.  As long as it moved it would serve their purpose just fine.  Its age and decrepit state meant it probably didn’t have a tracking device in it which was an added benefit.  It took a few minutes to hotwire the thing, so Yrenne took lookout duty, but there was hardly anyone walking the streets around them.

Soon enough the two women found themselves loading the larger of the containers of Imperial weapons into the back of the speeder.  They also picked a few of the rarer explosive charges and rifles from among the other crates to add to their haul, but they left a good portion of the stash for Jett and Rendar.  They may be thieves, smugglers, and mercenaries, but they had their own kind of honor and appropriate codes of conduct.

Jyn was starting to think they would pull off the escape complete with the weapons in tow and she had been overly worried for nothing.  Naturally, that’s when everything went to hell.

They were making their way through the downtown areas and were maybe a quarter of a klick from the spaceport when a familiar high pitched whine reached Jyn’s ears.  “I know that sound,” she said over the wind, “That’s a bad sound.”  She turned in her seat since Yrenne was piloting and tried to spot the source of the whine.  “I’ve got bad news,” Jyn called over her shoulder.

“How did they even find us?”

“I don’t know.  I haven’t seen any patrols or anything, but this part of the city probably has all kinds of surveillance cams set up.  Maybe they’re running a facial recognition program through the feeds.”

“I thought you said you wiped all the footage of us!” Yrenne accused.

“I did!” Jyn yelled indignantly.  “I just forgot to wipe the footage of me.”

“Are you kidding?  Why didn’t you mention that earlier?”

Jyn shrugged and pried the top off the crate in the back of the speeder.  “It didn’t seem important.  I thought you said you had blown all their damned transports!”

“I thought we had!” was all the reply she got.

The telltale hum of Imperial speeder bikes was getting closer.  Jyn pulled two heavy blasters from the box and settled herself against the seat, bracing her arms on either side of the headrest.  She still had her trusty BlasTech L-23 blaster pistol, but the standard stormtrooper weapons packed more of a punch.

Yrenne had sped up, but their decades old, stolen speeder couldn’t compete with Imperial machines built for speed.  All too soon there was a full squad of mounted troopers within firing range.  Jyn started shooting as soon as she thought it would do any good.  Bursts of red energy erupted from the deadly weapons in her hands and the troopers were forced out of their formation.  They started firing back and for the most part their shots went wide as Yrenne maneuvered the clunky speeder as best she could in a pale imitation of evasive flying.

Jyn managed to shoot down one speeder which sent its armor clad pilot to the ground.  The rest of the squad seemed to redouble their efforts in retaliation.  The stormtroopers were actually able to hit the speeder a few times making sparks fly in Jyn’s eyes and the sharp scent of melting metal sting her nose.  The speeder bucked as a bolt of energy hit something important.  Yrenne cursed and wrenched at the controls, but the overcorrection sent Jyn tumbling over the edge and she hit the ground hard, rolling to help absorb the impact.  She had lost one of her blasters on the way down and her shoulder ached where she had landed on it.  Out of the corner of her eye, Jyn could see the speeder, Yrenne at the helm, zipping off into the distance before the troopers pulled around and circled her as she rose to a crouch.

Yrenne had been true to her word.  Jyn was on her own.  If you fell behind, you were left behind, the ever present truth of Jyn’s life.

Still, she wasn’t going down without a fight.  Jyn would be dragged from this universe kicking and screaming when death came to claim her and she would take as many of the Imps down with her as she could.

The stormtroopers had all dismounted and were stalking toward her with their blasters raised.  There were five of them in a loose circle.  A hint of a smirk ghosted across Jyn’s lips.  She may be outnumbered, but she was certainly not outmatched.  The trick, she knew, was to use the bucketheads against themselves.

Before they could lay a hand on her, Jyn rolled behind the nearest trooper and used his momentary confusion to shoot the next nearest trooper.  Without waiting to see her first victim fall, she kicked out at the trooper’s legs in front of her and brought him to his knees.  She didn’t give him the chance to bring his blaster up to shoot her point blank, instead Jyn bashed him with her own heavy weapon, armor cracking with the force of it, and he crumbled to the floor, unmoving.

Seeing two of their comrades fall inspired the remaining three troopers to start shooting.   Jyn ducked and dodged, she got in close and used a third trooper as a temporary shield which resulted in his own squadmate firing a kill shot while Jyn fired back.  She managed to knock the blaster from the fourth trooper’s hands, but he was still standing and took advantage of the fact by rushing straight toward her.  She had to spin and shove the dead trooper in her arms at a clunking stormtrooper who had been trying to sneak up behind her.  He was distracted by the sudden weight in his arms and Jyn kicked the blaster from his hand, then rammed her own into his helmet.  He went down, pinned under his fellow soldier.

The fifth and final trooper, the one she had disarmed a moment ago, barreled into her head first.  They hit the ground hard and Jyn’s breath left her all at once.  The heavy trooper tried to hold her down, but instinct took over and Jyn jabbed him in the vulnerable places between his armor.  He jerked back just enough to allow her to get a leg up and push him off.

Jyn scrambled to get to her feet so she could dispatch her final opponent, but she barely got to a crouch when something struck her from behind with the force of a rampaging bantha.  She fell forward to her hands and knees, eyes watering from the pain.  Through the vibrant agony in her skull Jyn managed to think _what?_   She attempted to turn to face her attacker and only caught a glimpse of white plastoid out of the corner of one blurry eye before she was hit again, this time across the face.  Jyn tasted blood in her mouth as she fell sideways, her body coming to rest on the paved ground.

Six.  There had been six stormtroopers, not just the standard squad of five.  Jyn had miscounted.  Even with her brain full of fog she was positive there had only been five troopers to dismount and circle her.  Where had the sixth come from?

“Forty-Two, good to see you’re alive,” a voice to her right said.

“It will take more than this Rebel scum to do me in.”

Jyn closed her eyes as her vision swam and she realized that the sixth was the trooper she had shot down from the speeder.  He must have picked himself up and ran to join the rest of the squad, getting there just in time to take Jyn by surprise.  This was why she had been taught to never leave a trooper alive if she could help it.

Her head was pounding, begging for the blissful quiet of unconsciousness even as she refused to surrender to it, but she was still too dazed to do anything about the stuncuffs she could feel being placed around her wrists after her arms were forced behind her back.

“What do you know, Forty-Two, I think we found who raided the armory before destroying half the outpost.”

“And look,” said Forty-Two, pulling something from a pocket on Jyn’s trousers, “A handful of identichips.  What do you want to bet these are forgeries?”

Jyn could just make out the trooper who was still patting her down for weapons – he had already removed her blaster pistol and truncheons – hand something over to the trooper standing over them.  He must have run the chips through a reader because his next words made what was left of Jyn’s pride cringe.

“They’re forgeries alright, and not even good ones.”

Of course they weren’t good, they weren’t done yet!  She had knicked the identichips off a group of people whose inane chatter had annoyed her immensely as she tended a bar back on Mandalore.  It was always easier to start with a real chip and wipe it herself rather than try to use the subpar imitation chips you could buy on the black market.  She had only just started to work on that bunch when Karrde had contacted her about a favor he was calling in.

She had been trying to ready a few different identities for herself to have on hand just in case.  It was harder to do when she was moving around so much.  She was still one of the best damn slicers she had ever heard of, but it was also true that she hadn’t had the luxury of stopping anywhere with good equipment and or had enough time to do a decent job in a long while.  In fact, she had gone to Mandalore specifically to find and use a computer terminal that wasn’t ancient like most of the ones you find in the Outer Rim.  Her Liana Hallik scandocs were probably the last high quality forgeries she’d done, and Jyn had made those back when she was still Tanith Pontha.

But to say her work wasn’t good was an insult the smug stormtrooper didn’t know the true depth of.

“Oh hey, Slider, I found another chip.  Damn well hidden too, in her glove.”

The stormtroopers’s voice jolted Jyn back to reality.  She must have been drifting if she didn’t feel it when the trooper had pushed her onto her stomach to get access to her gloved hands.

“Hmm, this is a real one and it’s hers.  Liana Hallik.  She must be some kind of supplier then, probably a slicer.”

“So Hallik,” the trooper called Forty-Two said standing and shoving a boot in her side to flip her back over so that she was forced to look up at them from the ground, “We’ve got you on sabotage, escaping custody, possession of illegal weapons, forgery of Imperial documents, and resisting arrest.  That ought to get you close to a life sentence.  You’re as good as dead.”

Jyn tried to glare at the columns of white above her, but it hurt too much to focus her eyes on anything.

“Part of me wants to kill you right now for what you just did to my squad, but part of me relishes the idea of your misery as you waste away in a work camp.  A quick death is too good for you.”

 _Joke’s on you_ , Jyn thought to herself.  In her opinion it was better to be sentenced to an Imperial prison camp as Liana Hallik where she had the possibility of figuring out an escape than to be interrogated and executed as Jyn Erso.

“The skiff is here.  Get her up.”

Jyn was dragged roughly to her feet and quickly discovered that being vertical did not really agree with her at the moment.  A fresh wave of pain washed through her battered head and spread downwards to the rest of her battle weary body.  They shoved her toward a small skiff hovering on repulsors that had to belong to Fed-Dub because Jyn’s team had destroyed everything on the base that could be used as transport.  At least, that was the theory.  The speeder bikes parked all around them were poking pretty substantial holes in that assumption.

She didn’t want to admit it but when a trooper shoved her onto the floor of the skiff after she put up a token struggle she was relieved.  Jyn knew exactly what was waiting for her in the near future and some part of her was terrified at the concept of being stuck in the same miserable place for so long, but most of her was just grateful not to be standing up anymore.  She couldn’t believe she had messed up this badly.  Jett had been right to warn her to lay low.  She had let her fears at being tracked down by the Rebellion get the better of her and now she was paying the price. 

She spat blood onto a pair of white boots next to her and they kicked back at her in retaliation.  Jyn smirked and leaned her head back against the skiff as it started to move.  The funny thing was, she thought she could hear someone calling her name over the rush of air.  Frantic shouts of “Liana?  Liana!” followed her through the city.  She must have been hallucinating.  Head trauma did all kinds of weird things.  It could even make her think someone cared that she was being taken away to face a life of hard labor on some distant world where she was sure to die sooner rather than later.

 

***

 

It had been almost a month since Cassian had found Jyn Erso masquerading as a mercenary of some kind going by the name Liana Hallik.  He had found her and lost her.  It was a fact he regretted more at this moment than ever as he sat in his U-Wing heading back to Yavin IV after an alarming meeting on the Ring of Kafrene.  He ran a hand over his face – which now sported a thin moustache due to lack of time and resources to keep himself clean shaven – and then through his hair that was also longer than it had been in a while.  The information he had just received ran through his mind in a constant refrain.  A defector, Saw Gerrera, Galen Erso, kyber crystals, the weapon – a _planet killer_ – and the missing link, Jyn Erso.  They had to find her now.  How could he have lost her so soon after finding her?

Cassian could remember that day with the clarity that all missed opportunities retain.  He had been watching Liana Hallik converse with Rendar on the merits of different models of light freighters while he scrubbed down some pots and pans in the kitchen of their small accommodations.  She had looked calmer than when they had spoken after the attack in town, he knew a decent meal always helped to settle an anxious body.  Cassian had been thinking about ways to approach her about going back to Base One with him and not set her off yelling again when a soft chime sounded from his comlink.  He stepped further away from the group and turned his back to them so that he could answer the comm.

“Kay, what is it?”

“We are receiving a priority signal from home.”

That meant it was Draven, which in turn meant he couldn’t ignore it.  The director of Alliance Intelligence didn’t often contact active field agents, but when he did, it meant business.

“Damn,” he said to himself and glanced back at Liana.  If he left to go talk to Draven he would lose his opportune moment to talk to the woman.  The other side of the dilemma was the way that superiors could make life hellish if they were ignored for too long.  There was nothing for it, at the end of the day he was a soldier.

He collected himself to make his exit.  “I have to go take care of something,” he told the group at large.  “I’ll be back in a bit for that help you promised.”

Most of the assembled group ignored this announcement.  Only Jett and Liana acknowledged his words.  The older man gave him a friendly nod, but the woman smirked and threw him a mock salute.  “Take your time, pretty boy.  We criminals can take care of ourselves.”

It was right at that moment that Cassian knew leaving was a bad idea.  He recognized that sloppy salute and the sly grin.  He’d seen them twice before on the face of two equally talented and infuriating women just before they had flown out of his life on two distinct occasions almost a year apart.  And not just any woman.  _This_ woman.  A woman he had gone to for help in the past, just as he was now, their partnerships not lasting for more than a day before they went their separate ways.  But even in that short a space of time Cassian had been impressed by her skill, her wit, and her fighting.  That was the other thing he knew he had recognized earlier in the day.  He had watched Kestrel Dawn take down most of a squad of stormtroopers on Toprawa in a surprising display of efficient combat skills.  He may not have seen Tanith Pontha fight, but he had been on the receiving end of one of her punches and knew that they could leave a man reeling.  The way she fought was distinctive: fearless, scrappy, instinctual, and always on the offensive.  Just like Liana Hallik.

He remembered other things too.  He had a vivid memory of standing in a sheltered alcove telling the slicer Dawn that he wanted to look into a scientist called Galen Erso.  He recalled how still she had gone and then the strain in her voice as she tried not to show that she had recognized the name.  His thoughts flashed to a time several months ago when he stood close to the smuggler Tanith Pontha and looked at old Imperial shipping manifests.  His offhand mention of Erso had caused her to stop breathing for a few moments and her hand had twitched.  He recalled her words as Liana from earlier that day as she danced around the topic of fathers and children.

It all added up to one statistically unlikely truth:  Kestrel Dawn, Tanith Pontha, and Liana Hallik were all the same person, and that person was Jyn Erso.

And Jyn Erso had just given him her signature parting salute.

Cassian had wanted desperately to stay, but he had known he couldn’t.  He locked his gaze onto hers and threatened, “I’ll be back in one hour.”  She just quirked an unimpressed eyebrow.

The usually pleasant walk through Nashal had seemed interminable and his conversation with Draven had been more frustrating than was typical, all because he had a bad feeling in his gut.  Kay-Tu didn’t help matters by insisting that he not be made to stay in the ship any longer.  In the end Cassian had relented.  He figured that on the off chance Jyn hadn’t decided to run but he still couldn’t persuade her to willingly come to the Rebellion, then he would ask Kay to step in and help her for her own good.

He had arrived back at their safe house to find both Jyn and Yrenne missing.  Rendar said that the mercenary woman had gone out to get some fresh air because cabin fever was setting in.  A thorough check of the whole house proved that Jyn had not gone upstairs to rest as the red haired smuggler had claimed.

“Hey, don’t blame me!  I’m not getting paid to babysit anyone.”  Cassian glared at him for his lack of concern.  “Look Sward, the kid can take care of herself.  Don’t worry so much,” Rendar finished and lounged back on the couch.

Cassian was disgusted with the lot of them, but he supposed that’s what happened when a bunch of people who are accustomed to working solo are forced to be part of a team.  He managed to keep his face calm and expressionless as he walked back out the door.  Kay joined him and together they brainstormed the most likely places to find Jyn.  They quickly narrowed it down to a spaceport based on her penchant for flying away, but Nashal had three.  Cassian knew he didn’t have time to search them all, but each of them had lain closer to the city center near the river than his location at the time so he decided to see which direction felt right when he got closer.  He and Kay set off at a brisk pace.

As the buildings became taller and more industrial in nature, Cassian had begun to see scorch marks on the pavement and on the duracrete sides of buildings.  His heart skipped a beat when he saw a crashed speeder bike.  It had been one of Imperial design which meant it had gone down in a confrontation of some kind.  He kept walking, his pace turning into more of a light jog.

“Cassian you are being conspicuous,” Kay warned him.  “Are you that worried?”

He didn’t answer the droid, he just followed a trail of scorch marks marring the otherwise well-kept business district of Nashal.  Soon enough he had come upon a pile of white clad bodies and a small gathering of civilians who looked at the scene with a combination of fascination and horror.  He hadn’t seen a small female form laying broken on the pavement which was a small consolation, but he still hadn’t known where Jyn had gone.

He turned to the dumbstruck citizens.  “The girl.  She’s petite with dark hair.  What happened to her?”  His native Festian accent was thick in his voice from his agitation.

“They took her,” one man said.

“Where?”

The man pointed and sure enough Cassian could see a skiff about one hundred paces down the street.  There were at least three white helmeted heads glinting in the harsh glow of Nashal’s electric lights.

“No,” he muttered to himself in horror.  “Liana? Liana!” he called as he had started running.  He had been careful to use her alias since Cassian hadn’t wanted the Empire to find out who she really was.  He kept calling after her until the skiff’s speed far outstripped his own.

“I take it Jyn Erso has been captured.  Perhaps she’s not as good as you previously claimed,” Kay-Tu said when he came to stand next to Cassian.  He had looked up at the droid, somewhat lost for what to do next.  Kay seemed to sense his master’s distress because his next words had been unusually free of judgement.  “At least she’s alive.  They would not bother to take her if she had been killed.”

Kay was right.  If she was alive there was still a chance for him to get to her.  “You’re right, Kay.  They’ll take her to the outpost before they ship her off somewhere.  If we hurry we can head them off in the U-wing.”

“I would advise against doing that, Cassian.  Since the attack yesterday, security at the outpost has been doubled and Moff Vorru brought reinforcements with him when he arrived from Corellia.  We do not have the resources to make rescuing Jyn Erso from Talus a statistical success.”

“But we have to,” Cassian had said with urgency.

“We cannot.”

Kay’s assessment made him want to punch something. He had been so close!  “Can we find out where they’re taking her at least?”

Kay had cocked his head in a very human gesture and appeared to consider the question.

“If I can patch into an Imperial network it is possible.”

“Then let’s get back to the ship, quickly.  Maybe we can intercept something.”  It had been the best they could do without access to an actual Imperial computer terminal.

The exercise had been fruitless in the end.  An outgoing transmission called for a shuttle for prisoner transport, but it didn’t mention where they were taking her.

That was it.  Jyn Erso was lost to him.  Months of work wasted, and they had to start all over trying to figure out what prison facility they took her to.  At least she would be forced to stay still until he could find her.  Unless they killed her before she had even arrived or she managed to free herself.  The woman was quite resourceful, he knew that firsthand.

In the meantime he’d been ordered to either return to base with Jyn Erso in tow or proceed to Corulag because something had come up.  Something was _always_ coming up and had been forced to abandon his best lead because he hadn’t been equipped to take on a whole Imperial base on his own, no matter how small.

That had been just over three weeks ago and now the game had changed.  A third party who didn’t know the threads of the story he’d been chasing had confirmed his hunches.  It wasn’t just a crazy theory anymore.  In fact, if what Tivik had said was true, it was worse than anything he had imagined.  Now they needed Jyn Erso, she was the link.  Cassian would do whatever was necessary to get General Draven and Chief Mon Mothma to see that.  He already had his commandeered data tech scouring Imperial records from throughout the galaxy in search of her, but Draven could put a priority on the search and increased computing power could only find her faster.

When he finally landed in the large hangar of Base One, Cassian instructed Kay-Tu to take care of the landing protocols before he practically ran into the Massassi Temple that served as the Rebellion’s headquarters.  His lack of decorum garnered more than a few raised eyebrows and surprised comments.  Cassian wasn’t typically one to be seen rushing anywhere, but news on the scale of a planet killer couldn’t wait.

He burst into Draven’s office after only a brief pause to send an aide to fetch Mothma since she needed to hear what he had to say.

General Draven looked up at Cassian, his expression hard.  “Captain Andor.  This is unexpected.”

“Sir, I’ve just come from meeting with an asset, one of Saw’s men.  There’s new information about the weapon and it _fits_.”

The general frowned.  “Can you trust this information?  Gerrera’s people are not always the most reliable.”

“It’s good intel, sir.”

Draven studied him, searching for what Cassian didn’t know.  What Cassian did know was that he had good instincts and right now they were shouting that this was it, this time it was real.  He hoped Draven could see that too.

“Alright, what is it?” the general finally asked in an authoritative voice.

“A planet killer.”

Draven scowled.  “You can’t be serious.”

“A message from inside the Empire, sir.  And based on what Tivik said it came from deep within the Empire.”

The General’s scowl merely deepened, his mouth twisting, but he didn’t say anything.

There was the sound of a throat being cleared from behind him and Cassian turned, startled, to find Mon Mothma.  She wore her ever present white robes, but her usually serene face looked tense.  “Perhaps you should start from the beginning, Captain.”

So he told them.

Cassian outlined the rumors and the information that was solid as well the hunches that were passed quietly from sector to sector.  He told them of his suspicions about Galen Erso’s research, involvement, and disappearance, a line of inquiry that had started with one drunk man on an Imperial occupied Outer Rim world.  He explained what Tivik had said about a cargo pilot that defected and went to Saw Gererra with a message from the elusive Galen Erso.  He gave details about Erso’s work in crystallography and energy enrichment and how the kyber crystals from Jedha fit into the story.  He finished up by telling them what he had learned about Jyn Erso growing up with Gerrera and his knowledge that she was in the hands of the enemy at the moment under the name Liana Hallik.  Mothma looked thoughtful after Cassian’s deluge of words, but Draven looked mistrustful as always.

“And you want us to do what exactly?” Draven asked.

“Break Jyn out, then we can use her to get Saw to talk to us.  He won’t tell us the message, but he might tell her. He might even know Galen’s location, something he would probably only tell her.  At the very least she gets us an in with him so that we have a chance to verify the weapon’s existence.”

“It’s an awfully big risk.  This whole thing could be a ruse put in place by the Empire to draw us out,” he said, showing the caution that Cassian had seemingly abandoned in the face of a puzzle that was finally starting to take shape.

Cassian shook his head.  “I don’t think so.  The way the information fits together is both too haphazard and too specific to be a plant.”

“He’s right, you know, Davits. We should at least get first hand verification, but Gerrera won’t talk to us, he hasn’t in years.  If the Captain showed up on his doorstep and asked for the information Saw would kill him on the spot.  If Erso’s daughter really does have some connection with him, then maybe if she tags along he’ll let Andor state his case before drawing a weapon.”  The Rebellion’s head of state turned the full force of her gaze on the Alliance’s Director of Intelligence.  “It’s worth a shot.”

Draven couldn’t say no to that.  It was practically an order.  He sighed wearily instead and focused his stare on Cassian.

“So the Empire has her and they think she’s called Liana Hallik.  How do you know that, Andor?”

“You know I have been looking for her in pursuit of the Galen Erso angle,” he began.  Draven nodded and waved a hand to encourage Cassian to continue.  “A couple weeks ago Sergeant Colm recognized her from a computer generated holo-rendering I had passed around the troops scheduled to leave the base.  He contacted me with the tip and I went to the Corellian system to check it out.  It was her, Jyn Erso, using the name Liana Hallik and running with a group of smugglers and mercenaries.  While trying to leave the planet, at least I suspect she was attempting to leave, she was tracked down and captured.  Fortunately, Erso is a superb slicer and they assumed Hallik was her official identity.  If they knew who she really was she probably would have gotten worse than a prison sentence.”

Draven was frowning as he went over Cassian’s story in his head.  “But you haven’t said how you know this Hallik woman is Erso.”

“It’s her, I just know! There were little things that she didn’t consciously give away, but I saw them anyway.  Liana Hallik is Jyn Erso,” Cassian said with impatience.  He wanted the search to be made official immediately and all these questions were just slowing things down.  How could he even explain that he’d met her at least twice in the past before he even knew Jyn Erso existed?  Something in him was reluctant to tell his superiors about her long ago reactions to her father’s name which had combined with his recently acquired knowledge of her background to make him certain of her true identity.  Instead he said nothing and kept his gaze, steady and determined, fixed right on Draven. 

“I assume,” the General began haltingly, “you already have someone working on tracking her down?”

“Yes sir.”

“One person won’t be enough.  I’ll order a full team to be put on the search immediately.  If you’re right, Andor, then we may not have long.  If we know about this defector and his message then the Empire probably does too.  We have to move fast on this.”  Draven got up from his desk to finally put Cassian’s plans into effect.  The rust haired officer brushed past one of his best operatives without pause, already intent on his new course of action.

Cassian let out a small breath of relief.  Even with the bone chilling specter of a weapon powerful enough to destroy a planet, at least they knew now and the Rebellion could begin to do something about it.  He hadn’t wasted years of his time trying to find something that was nothing more than gossip among the zealots and criminals of the universe.

Mon Mothma was looking at him with tension still written in every line of her body.  He couldn’t imagine what she must think about a weapon that could only be used for genocide when she had always struggled to find a diplomatic solution to the Empire’s cruel tactics. 

“For all the good work you’ve done Captain, I hope you’re wrong,” she told him before sweeping from the room.

Even with a whole team working around the clock combing through every bit of information they could get their hands on, it still took another couple of days before they located her.  It was just a couple of lines in a report buried within thousands of similar documents.  All it said was “Liana Hallik – prisoner 6295-alpha, transferred to Wobani Imperial Detention Center and Labor Camp.  Sentence: 20 years.”  That was all they had, but it was enough.  Fortunately the tech who made the discovery had the good sense to go to Cassian with the information and not directly to General Draven.  Cassian was able to do some quick research on the planet and its sole point of interest before going himself to alert his superior of their progress.

“General Draven, they’ve found her,” he said once he’d tracked the man down in the main control room and handed over a datapad of information.

“Wobani…” he muttered looking over the files Cassian had pulled on the planet.

He decided it would be faster to summarize.  Time was of the essence after all.  “It’s a bleak world in the Bryx Sector of the Mid Rim.  It’s not heavily fortified or defended since it’s just a prison world largely for petty offenders.  Once we’re onsite we should be able to access the internal system to locate her more precisely.”  The general raised an eyebrow at Cassian’s use of the collective pronoun.  Cassian proposed his plan anyway.  “Sir, I request permission to lead an extraction team to Wobani to retrieve Jyn Erso.”

“Absolutely not.  Denied.”

Cassian had half expected such an answer, but he had thought the general would at least consider the request before denying it outright.  “Sir, she’s been my lead since the beginning, so it’s my responsibility to get her out.”

“I said no, Captain.  Infiltration and extraction are not your specialty.  I have people specifically trained for this type of thing.  You can interrogate her all you want once we have her, but I’m sending a small team of Pathfinders to get her.”

Cassian couldn’t argue with that, no matter how much he might want to.  The general was correct.  Cassian’s skillset was not ideally suited for a smash and grab type of operation, but he’d be damned if he was going to trust the fate of Jyn Erso to a group of soldiers he didn’t know all that well.  He turned on his heel and went to find Kay-Tu, leaving Draven to organize his troops.

The droid was sitting stock still among several other droids recharging in a maintenance room.  His photoreceptors glowed in the dim light and swiveled in their sockets to track Cassian as he entered the space.  “Kay, I have a job for you,” Cassian said.  The droid waited silently for his instructions.  “The techs located Jyn Erso and Draven’s sending a team to Wobani to retrieve her.  I want you to go with them.”

“Am I authorized for such a mission?” asked Kay.

“I’m authorizing it!” Cassian said, his voice flaring with emotion.  He took a deep breath to steady himself.  “You’re an Imperial security droid so you’ll blend in on a prison world.  I need you to do whatever you have to in order to rescue her.  Do you understand?”

“Of course, Cassian. My presence raises the odds of a successful extraction to fifty-six percent.  When do I leave?”

“Soon.  Maybe an hour.  Draven’s calling up a team of Pathfinders.”

The droid unplugged the power line from his chassis and stood up to tower over Cassian at his full height.  “Then I will go offer to prepare a ship for the mission,” he said and started out the door.

“Kay,” Cassian called to him and waited for the droid to face him from the doorway.  “Thank you.”

After a night of barely sleeping, his mind too anxious to settle, it was mid-afternoon when Cassian watched the U-wing the extraction team had taken to Wobani skim over the treetops of the jungle making its way toward the base.  He went to find Draven, knowing that they wouldn’t waste any time before talking to the woman.  He was right, Draven was already waiting in the Command room and General Dodanna was hovering nearby studying a datapad as well.  His superior acknowledged his presence with a nod.  “You’re sure about this?” he said to Cassian in a low voice.  “Jedha is pretty volatile right now with the Empire stripping the Holy City of everything that made it noteworthy in the first place.”

“It’s our best option,” he said firmly and went to go stand out of the way as he heard footsteps approaching.

He studied the petite woman from the shadows as she took in her surroundings and sized up Draven and Mothma.  Cassian was somewhat surprised to find that Jyn Erso was both everything and nothing like he had expected.  Her month in the labor camp hadn’t done her any favors, but the defiant glint in her bright gray-green eyes was as strong as ever and her sharp wit hadn’t dulled.  Stripped clean of all her previous identities and the small quirks that went with them, he saw the core of the person who had lain beneath each of them.  She was blunt and difficult, keen eyed and intelligent, and not at all interested in being helpful if it didn’t serve her own interests.

He tried and soon failed to keep his voice calm and level as he directly questioned her about her father and Saw Gerrera for the first time.  He took in her every reaction to hearing the name _Erso_ and saw how each mention was both a blow and a reminder of her own personal resilience.  He couldn’t tell if she recognized him.  Her expression flickered between annoyance, curiosity, and anger, but even when her gaze lingered on him for a few moments he never saw a hint of recognition.  She merely furrowed her brows like he was something out of place, an entity she couldn’t quite figure out yet.  Some part of him was disappointed that he appeared to have made so little an impression on her.  Ultimately, however, it didn’t matter, she had told him back on Talus what she prized above all else and if his presence wasn’t enough to get her to agree to accompany him to Jedha then he knew what would.

When Mon Mothma offered Jyn her freedom in exchange for her help Cassian knew that they had her.  She had said that she would do what was necessary maintain her life and her freedom, so now she was going to help him find her father and the weapon he had built for the Empire.  Cassian would use the _need_ in her eyes to further the Rebellion’s goals and with any luck she wouldn’t stab him in the back for his efforts.  He had no doubt their trip to Jedha would be an interesting one.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Mostly I'm wondering how my military history professors would respond if they knew I used my knowledge of Vauban's Seventeenth Century fortifications for Star Wars fanfiction. I'm choosing to believe that they are secretly pleased. 
> 
> I hope you have enjoyed reading my version of the events leading up to Rogue One and exploring the backgrounds of these characters. Thanks for reading!


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